Lanfranco Aceti2018-03-18T21:23:56Zhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/feed/atom/WordPressLanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=61572018-03-18T21:23:56Z2018-03-02T21:36:01Z<p><em>Where Is Space?</em> is a conversation between Professor Vincent Brown (Harvard) and Professor Lanfranco Aceti (MIT and BU) on issues of <em>space</em> and its relationship to the construction of contemporary visual, literary, and historical contexts and narratives. Professor Brown will talk about space, time, and slavery in the context of contemporary digital media. The lecture will take place in the Plimpton Room, Barker Center, Room 133, Harvard University on Thursday, March 22, 2018, from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm.</p>
<p>Inspired by Italo Calvino’s <em>Six Memos for the Next Millennium</em> and Umberto Eco’s <em>Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, </em>part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at the Mahindra Humanities Center, the conversation will be published by MIT Press as part of larger project that analyzes issues of time, space, movement, matter, light, and the unknown. The volume will be using a new publication platform, <a href="https://cac.pubpub.org/">Contemporary Arts and Cultures (CAC)</a>, realized by <a href="https://www.media.mit.edu/people/trich/projects/">Travis Rich</a> at the MediaLab that Aceti, as editor in chief of LEA, has been testing as part of its experimental remits within MIT Press.</p>
<p>“‘So that the rough sand should not harm the snake-haired head (anquiferumque caput dura ne laedat harena), he makes the ground soft with a bed of leaves, and on top of that he strews little branches of plants born under water, and on this he places Medusa’s head, face down.’ [….] But the most unexpected thing is the miracle that follows: when they touch Medusa, the little marine plants turn into coral and the nymphs, in order to have coral for adornments, rush to bring sprigs and seaweeds to the terrible head.” [1]</p>
<p>Professor Brown will analyze motifs and structures that are emerging from the site of trauma and the complexity of visualizing, narrating, and historicizing concurrent multiple events and timelines which coexist, intertwine, and spun global and local interactions. It is the <em>locus</em>—with its complex layered and sedimented texture, the result of embracing and connecting with multiple visions, narratives, and histories—that offers us the possibility of retracing, analyzing, and understanding the space we occupy as well as ourselves as repositories of compounded histories.</p>
<p>What are, then, the metaphors and allegories that we can use in order to understand space? What is the space that we occupy today and that is drenched by trauma, social and political upheaval, and systemic pauperization of entire communities? Is there an inclusive space of utopia beyond the capitalistic / nationalistic dystopia of a return to a golden age forever dreamed but that never existed? More importantly, how do we travel to such a space?</p>
<p>[1] Italo Calvino, <em>Six Memos for the Next Millennium</em>, trans. Patrick Creagh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 6.</p>
<p>This event is graciously supported by the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, Contemporary Arts and Cultures, Operational and Curatorial Research, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and MIT Press.</p>
<p>With thanks to the Mahindra Humanities Center.</p>
<p>Biography</p>
<p><strong>Vincent Brown</strong>, Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies, is a multi-media historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice. He directs the History Design Studio and teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery. Brown is the author of The Reaper&#8217;s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and producer of an audiovisual documentary about the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens. He is currently writing a book about African diasporic warfare in the Americas.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/PSPDMcFkycM" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2018/03/where-is-space/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=61252018-02-28T16:58:35Z2018-02-27T17:49:14Z<p><i>Can You Feel It? I Can Feel It</i> is a new installation work by Lanfranco Aceti created for the exhibition, <i>When All is Said… and Done</i>, curated by Artemis Potamianou for the Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes gallery in London. Participating artists include: Lanfranco Aceti, Aggelos Antonopoulos, Bill Balaskas, Jackie Berridge, Jimi Efthimiou-Dimitris Mitsopoulos-Vivi Papanikola, George Harvalias, Lady Michelle, Frini Mouzakitou, Giorgos Papadatos, Artemis Potamianou, Clay Smith, and Mark Titchner.</p>
<p>Composed of twenty-four panels that alternate the words ‘YES’ and ‘NO,’ Aceti’s most recent work of art represents a mockery of the role that referenda have played within the European Union, as well as the value attributed to those same words within the context of an intimate relationship. The artist, who has worked for years with themes of labor exploitation, social exclusion, political upheaval, and financial enslavement, continues to explore the relationship between sex, love, politics, and power. Set within a contemporary context in which even personal relationships are constructed on capitalistic terms of exploitation, use, and abuse, the affirmations ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ have acquired a different meaning. The hypocrisy of the question asked—and the hypocrisy of the answer to that question—no longer holds true in a context in which everyone is aware of everyone else’s misgivings.</p>
<p>The expression of consent, or its negation for that matter, is no longer freely given and is relinquished and surrendered based on a lack of equal standing and/or deliberate suppression of freedom. In this respect, consent is given in response to a question that is no longer offering choices, but rather expecting pre-determined answers, as well as demanding the compliance of the respondent. In the artist’s aesthetic approach, this contemporary predicament became abundantly clear in recent and past European referenda which were repeatedly submitted to its citizens until the population voted in the ‘right way.’ Aceti’s work analyses the current state of socio-political participation and broader notions of consent that are now based upon the unspoken stipulation of conforming to expectations and desires of the body politic. This semantic shift is reflected in the same way personal relationships, reduced to forced forms of exploitation, no longer express a freedom of choice, but reinforce bonds and ties enslaving intimacy to the expectation of what is required and not the ‘reality’ of negotiating between two different, and at times, opposing desires. Using one another and expecting compliance nullifies the answer of a ‘YES&#8217; or a ‘NO,&#8217; which no longer reflect the expression of an inner desire, but the necessity of deferring to the will of the questioner.</p>
<p>“In recent years I have been focusing on the representation of the nation state as a physical person. It is an ancient metaphor that in the contemporary landscape of socio-economic crisis has allowed me to reflect upon the relationship between western post-democracies and post-citizenship. The relationship that is being explored in the artwork is one that straddles the domains of love and hate. It is in this context of conflict—in which the nation state and its citizens are personified—that the relationship becomes one of confrontation and warring whereby questions and answers are constructed upon treacherous lies, wary misgivings, and shifting meanings. No one means what they say, or says what they mean. It all becomes a pantomime in which love and power blend seamlessly within a struggle that is continuous and inescapable.”</p>
<p>Through its materiality, Aceti’s artwork—made of trash bags, acrylic paint, and non-lubricated colored condoms—wishes to engage with contemporary trash politics, false referenda, unrequited love, pragmatic lies, and alternative realities.</p>
<p>It is in this context that the artist explores the chaos of contemporary post-democracies, the idea of post-citizenship, and the concept of social rape as perpetrated by current politics. In the midst of the collapse of social decency in both personal and political relationship, the artist asks the question: “Who is fucking whom?”</p>
<p>Lanfranco Aceti, <i>Can You Feel It? I Can Feel It</i>, 2018. Acrylic paint, trash bags, and non-lubricated colored condoms. Dimensions: 200 cm x 579 cm. Panel detail: 50 cm x 50 cm.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/TkI3aMRreQM" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2018/02/can-you-feel-it/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=60942018-02-14T22:30:17Z2018-02-11T22:52:16Z<p><a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/portfolio-items/annunciation/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Annunciation</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is the latest performance and sculptural installation by Lanfranco Aceti. As part of the exhibition </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">nEUROsis, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">the artwork was realized in Limassol, Cyprus, with the support of the non-profit organization </span><a href="http://www.neme.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NeMe</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Curated by Yiannis Colakides, the project was developed as part of a year long residency in which the artist explored via thorough research themes and concepts related to apocalypse, post-democracy, post-citizenship, activism, political art, and rebellion.</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Annunciation</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is a twisted representation, via a performance and a sculptural installation, of the contemporary socio-economic crisis that encompasses the multiple contradictions and conflicts that characterize our understanding of the world we live in.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“It is in this critical landscape that contemporary dystopia continues to unfold undermining financial, social, political, and ethical frameworks while favoring the resurgence and return of a patriarchal rhetoric of divisive nationalism,” said Aceti while explaining the research and the thought processes behind the works. “The works are supposed to be beautiful and haunting at the same time—a harbinger of happiness and incredible sadness. Imagine an invisible virus unleashed by Pestilence, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Why should the ‘person’ who unleashes the virus be also ravaged by disease and unhappy? Death is not necessarily a harbinger of horrors. In the name of Love, and through the abuse of Love and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">lovence</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, [1] horrors and tragedies have been consumed.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aceti conceived </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Annunciation</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> as a public performance and sculptural object that masterfully proclaims that the end of the world is starting </span><b>now</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">. The act of announcing, despite the message and its meaning, is embedded in one of the most beautiful islands of the Mediterranean: Cyprus. Cyprus is the birthplace of Venus the goddess of love and as such, in the mind of the artist, the best place to announce its end and the beginning of Death. The piece exists as a combination of multiple conceptual contradictions in an aesthetic landscape of homogeneity and post-modernity that barely pays lip service to ideas of diversity and irreconcilable differences. Although the artworks are embedded in a landscape of sufferance, since historically and in contemporary times the Mediterranean has been a </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">locus</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of social tensions, the moment of this visionary announcement is one of beauty which clashes and annihilates the dread and ominousness of the message.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aceti in his analysis refers to “an annunciation” as a moment of liberation from the decaying concept of nationalism and the burning flames of post-democracies in the Mediterranean, Europe, and the USA.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The question I kept asking myself over and over was: How would I announce the Apocalypse?” said Aceti. “The response came in the form of this performance and its sculptural elements.”</span></p>
<p>[1] Jacques Derrida,<em> The Politics of Friendship</em>, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 122.</p>
<p>Image credit: Lanfranco Aceti, <em>Annunciation</em>, 2018. Performance and sculptural installation. Photograph: Jonathan Munro.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/WLuc49Ua4Wo" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2018/02/the-annunciation/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=60872018-02-14T22:30:56Z2018-02-10T18:01:21Z<p><a href="http://act.mit.edu/projects-and-events/events/artistic-research-luncheon/lanfranco-aceti-disobedient-discontented-and-disruptive-politics-of-aesthetic-resistance-and-resilience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Disobedient, Discontented, and Disruptive: Politics of Aesthetic Resistance and Resilience</em></a> is a presentation by Professor Lanfranco Aceti at Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) @ MIT. The presentation, on Tuesday, February 13, 2018, is part of ACT luncheon series and engages faculty and students with the affiliate&#8217;s research and thought processes in the creation of new scholarly works, curatorial projects, or personal exhibitions.</p>
<p>“The repressed who sides with the revolution is, according to the standards of the beautiful life in an ugly society, uncouth and distorted by resentment […]” [1]</p>
<p>The lecture will discuss art within the context of ethical values—beyond the contemporary market and economical forces that have reduced all human endeavors to commodified outputs and outcomes. The re-introduction of ethical values, or more simply the re-introduction of ethics within society, brings art back, not so much into a Kantian aprioristic world, but into an ideological and social framework that can be identified as the superior teleology of art and society. In fact, both art and society have been eroded by militaristic, corporate, and oligarchic constructions that manifest themselves through the narratives of the body politic and through concepts of post-society, post-state, post-capitalism, post-democracy, post-citizenship, and post-art.</p>
<p>If art cannot exist any longer as a social endeavor and if anger can no longer be represented within an aesthetic context, if it is considered ‘uncouth’ and is subject to ugly society’s forms of control and censorship, then one must ask where is the public space that allows an analytical and reflective existence. The relationship between uncouth people, hierarchical societies, and public expressions of anger is further complicated by an historical impossibility for anything other than the institutional history of the ‘winners,’ also known as the truth [2] of the body politic, [3] to be widely represented, aestheticized, narrated, and memorialized.</p>
<p>[1] Theodor W. Adorno, <em>Aesthetic Theory</em> (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 67.</p>
<p>[2] “Rooted as it is in the interconnected concepts of universality, objectivity, and canonicity privileged by the (Anglo-American) critical establishment, the battle about the authority of anger surrounding feminist criticism can be read as a battle for or around ‘truth’: an inscription of the discourse of ‘the true’ constructed and disseminated by agencies of institutionalized authority (including the university and the media) that works to appropriate or silence the voices of opposition or dissent.” Brenda R. Silver, “The Authority of Anger: ‘Three Guineas’ as Case Study,” <em>Signs</em> 16, no. 2 (Winter, 1991): 341.</p>
<p>[3] “The Body politic is after all a myth which can ultimately be sustained only by consensus.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, <em>Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure</em> (London: Routledge, 1995), 84.</p>
<p>Image credit: Lanfranco Aceti, <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/portfolio-items/annunciation/"><em>Annunciation</em></a>, 2018. Performance and sculptural installation. Photograph: Jonathan Munro.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/fed4EpCp_RA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2018/02/disobedient-discontented-and-disruptive/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=60892018-02-10T18:11:27Z2018-02-10T17:40:32Z<p>Professor <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/">Lanfranco Aceti</a> (Boston University) and Professor <a href="https://rll-faculty.fas.harvard.edu/dorissommer">Doris Sommer</a> (Harvard University) have joined forces to deliver a student experience in interpretation of complex texts within art spaces. The semester-long course titled <a href="http://www.bu.edu/artsadmin/2016/04/07/arts-in-barcelona-picasso-at-war/">Arts in Barcelona</a>, analyzes how national conflicts and civil unrest affect forms of cultural production. <span id="more-10756"></span>Professor Aceti chose <em>The Politics of Friendship</em> by Jaques Derrida for the class Arts in Barcelona because of its focus on nationalism and its relevance to the challenges and complexities involved in arts administration on the international and national scale.</p>
<p>Professor Aceti was delighted to use Professor Sommer’s “Pre-text methodology” in interpreting extremely complex philosophical texts. Professor Sommer, who is an expert in Latin American studies, has developed a series of workshops that can be embedded within an art institution like the Harvard Art Museums within which reading becomes a form of creative activities and creation of new content from the participants. The workshop fosters a community understanding, as well as a sense of togetherness which allows for familiarity and mutual support in the intellectual interpretation of highly academic contextualized content.</p>
<p>Thanks to the support of the Harvard Art Museums and in particular of Alexandra Gaydos, students from BU were able to participate in a series of workshop activities based on collaborative efforts that linked Derrida’s text to the artworks exhibited within the galleries of the museum: Joan Snyder<em>Summer Orange;</em> Lorna Simpson<em> 1957-2009 Interior, 2009;</em> Morris Louis <em>Blue Veil; </em>Joseph Kosuth <em>Complicated, Titled: Art as Idea as Idea [Society];</em> Georg Baselitz <em>Saxon Motif</em> ; Victor <em>Grippo Analogia I; </em>Gunther Uecker <em>Spiral White;</em> and Alberto Burri <em>Legno e Rosso 3 (Wood and Red 3).</em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2018/02/harvard-bu-and-derrida/01_5p7a3525/" rel="attachment wp-att-6090"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6090" src="https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=940%2C627" alt="" width="940" height="627" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=200%2C133 200w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=300%2C200 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=400%2C267 400w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=600%2C400 600w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=768%2C512 768w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=800%2C533 800w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=1024%2C682 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?resize=1200%2C800 1200w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?w=1880 1880w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01_5P7A3525.jpg?fit=2000%2C1333 2000w" sizes="(max-width: 940px) 100vw, 940px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a></p>
<p>When asked about the pedagogical structures of the workshops put in place by Professor Sommer, Professor Aceti said that “the Pre-text Workshop allowed for students and faculty to bond together, as the choice of Derrida’s text dealt with the theme of <em>familiarity </em>and allowed for a reflection on issues of nationalism, love, and society. I wanted people to reflect more on the issues of nationalities, the disappearance of social structures, and the divisions existing within our contemporary worlds. The Pre-text Workshop had a surprising effect of creating a community, independent from nationalities, between all participants.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2018/02/harvard-bu-and-derrida/01-5p7a3579/" rel="attachment wp-att-6091"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6091" src="https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=940%2C627" alt="" width="940" height="627" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=200%2C133 200w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=300%2C200 300w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=400%2C267 400w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=600%2C400 600w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=768%2C512 768w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=800%2C533 800w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=1024%2C682 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?resize=1200%2C800 1200w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?w=1880 1880w, https://i2.wp.com/www.lanfrancoaceti.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/01-5P7A3579.jpg?fit=2000%2C1333 2000w" sizes="(max-width: 940px) 100vw, 940px" data-recalc-dims="1" /></a></p>
<p>All workshop participants had to choose one phrase to analyze from the text that they felt was closer to them and their personal history. Between the many phrases chosen, the following quote perhaps explains what could be a way of understanding our social interactions and the lack of friendship in contemporary social politics.</p>
<p>“Aristotle recalls not only that it is more worthwhile <em>to love</em>, but that you had better<em> love in this way</em>, and <em>not in that way</em>; and that hence <em>it is more worthwhile to love</em> than <em>to be loved</em>.” [1]</p>
<p>[1] Jaques Derrida, <em>The Politics of Friendship</em>, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 7.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/">Lanfranco Aceti</a></strong> is known for his social activism and extensive career as an artist, curator, and academic. He is a visiting professor and research affiliate at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the Academy of New Media Arts Cologne (KHM), and professor and director of the Department of Arts Administration at Boston University. He is the founder of <a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/">The Studium: Lanfranco Aceti Inc.</a>, the founder and Director of <a href="http://www.ocradst.org/">OCR</a> (Operational and Curatorial Research in Contemporary Art, Design, Science, and Technology), and founder and Director of <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/">MoCC</a> (Museum of Contemporary Cuts). He has exhibited and curated internationally. In 2017, he exhibited for <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/09/shimmer/"><em>Shimmer</em></a>, curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&amp;A), at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra; <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/portfolio-items/accursed/"><em>Accursed</em></a> for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/portfolio-items/knock-knock-knocking/"><em>Knock, Knock, Knocking</em></a> a public space installation. In 2018 Aceti is preparing a new series of exhibitions and performances.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://rll-faculty.fas.harvard.edu/dorissommer">Doris Sommer</a></strong> is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities, specifically through “Pre-Texts” in Boston Public Schools, throughout Latin America and beyond. Pre-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. Among her books are <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Foundational-Fictions-National-Romances-Literature/dp/0520082850/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1518199080&amp;sr=8-1-fkmr0&amp;keywords=Foundational+Fictions%3A+The+National+Romances+of+Latin+America+%281991%29"><em>Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America </em>(1991)</a>; <a href="https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=Proceed+with+Caution+when+Engaged+by+Minority+Literature"><em>Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Literature </em></a>(1999); <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bilingual-Aesthetics-Sentimental-Education-Public/dp/0822333449/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1518199157&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Bilingual+Aesthetics%3A+A+New+Sentimental+Education"><em>Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education </em></a>(2004); and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Work-Art-World-Agency-Humanities/dp/0822355868/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1518199189&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=The+Work+of+Art+in+the+World%3A+Civic+Agency+and+Public+Humanities"><em>The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities </em></a>(2014).</p>
<p><strong>Alexandra Gaydos</strong> is Project Assistant for the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art at the Harvard Art Museums. Alex works under the Division of Academic and Public Programs to support a broad range of activities in the museums’ Materials Lab. Alex has over a decade of experience working in studios, fine art galleries, and community art venues and is interested in the arts as a vehicle for expression, connection, advocacy, and meaning-making.</p>
<p><strong>Sarah E Bradshaw</strong> is an alumna of the Arts Administration masters program at Boston University. She and Professor Aceti have previously worked together, both during her time in the program and on the summer 2017 Comparative Cultural Policy course to Dublin and London. This term, she is assisting Professor Aceti with the Arts in Barcelona course and the Pre-Text seminar established by Professor Sommer. She currently works at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as the Executive Assistant to the Director.</p>
<p><strong>Polly Lauer</strong> is Cultural Agents’ Research Coordinator. She is a 2017 graduate of the College of William &amp; Mary, where she studied History and Latin American Studies. Next year, she will begin a doctoral program to study Latin American History, focusing on the importance of community radio as a cultural and political tool in Central America.</p>
<p><strong>Jahnvi Singh</strong> is a learning experience designer from India, and a Pre-Texts facilitator, with hands-on experience in the field of crafts &amp; making, education, and human-centered design. She has worked with young learners, educators, school leaders, museum curators, artists, environmentalists, and more to create cultural learning tools and connect classrooms to the real-world in a way that makes every day learning effective, valuable, and adaptable to the 21st century.</p>
<p>The head image credit: Joseph Kosuth, <em>Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) [Society])</em>, 1968. Photostat mounted to board. Detail.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/VKXVOr-K_ls" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2018/02/harvard-bu-and-derrida/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=60672018-02-10T18:06:15Z2018-01-04T00:39:32Z<p>Lanfranco Aceti’s new work, <i>Baked: The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off</i> (2017), is based on a neon installation from the exhibition, <i>nEUROsis</i>, curated by Yiannis Colakides for NeME. The artist defined these new works of art as a “series of perspectival studies envisioned through tinted glasses on moving life.” The artworks consist of prints and screen paintings, but also incorporate a series of combinatory gifs that focus on a single text and image. The text and the image, itself, are static and obsessively repeated, while embodying—through changing colors—movement, alteration, and evolution.</p>
<p>The neon installation is part of a series of works titled, <i>Sowing and Reaping</i>, which analyze issues of contemporary ideological oppression, labor exploitation, commodification, abuse, and absurdity. The neon artwork spurred the creation of an image which led to the development of an aesthetic analysis of the effects of both color and movement.</p>
<p>The images created via this process exist as colored lenses of personal perspectives and experiences; and are rooted in a socio-political history that has become, over the past decade, a recognizable reflection, increasingly personalized and historicized, of a present struggle.</p>
<p>Motivated by alterations and seriality in the long history of art, the artist sought to merge the complexity of representation of time, movement, and feeling. Resumed in Pablo Picasso’s statement, “colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions,” Aceti explored the relationship between color and emotion, which constituted the basis for an experimentation on color and movement, not perceived in traditional terms, but as the movement and alteration of emotions via the change of color in a static framework/image.</p>
<p>The artist’s intention is not to reclaim an operational environment, interpreted in traditional terms, rather to focus on recognizing the indelible alterations and re-interpretations of statements, words, and phrases that are embedded in the strifes of contemporary social histories. The seemingly empowering phrase, “we bake our own destiny,” is a clear reference to the self-made mythology of the American dream, which clashes—manifestly and symbolically—with the deterministic reality expressed in the title of the artworks. The title, <i>Baked</i>, references the hope and the tiredness (“Baked is where you are too tired to <i>fucking get off </i>of your couch”—from the Urban Dictionary) inherent to a condition of sustained ideological abuse, consumption of propaganda, and self-immolation as exploitable victims.</p>
<p>The series is, in itself, a form of revelation, uncovered in the work’s subtitle. <i>The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off</i> leaves no space for misinterpretation. This series of new works continues a line of thinking, research, and aesthetic exploration that the artist began thirty years ago, focusing on the existential dramas and exploitative natures of institutions and their accomplices. <i>The Annunciation</i>, <i>Sowing and Reaping</i>, and <i>Baked: The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off</i> create a trifold series of exhibitions which explore the consequences of socio-political decisions. The artist pursues this exploration as an attempt to find escape and refuge from the tensions and pitfalls of a landscape that appears unequivocally immune to such consequences.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/ToL_6geV0BA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2018/01/baked/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=60572018-02-10T16:31:43Z2017-12-04T01:29:52Z<p><a href="https://contemporaryarts.mit.edu/pub/bliss"><i>Remainders at the End of a Summer Bliss</i></a>, by Lanfranco Aceti, is a curatorial essay that surveys Bill Balaskas’s exhibition, <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/portfolio-items/remains-of-a-summer-bliss/"><i>Remains of a Summer Bliss</i></a>, at the Kalfayan Galleries, Athens and Thessaloniki. Featured on their new platform, <a href="https://contemporaryarts.mit.edu/">Contemporary Arts and Cultures (CAC)</a>, the essay is published by the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), MIT Press. In a globalized context of ruthless capitalism, this curatorial essay examines from afar the drama of Mediterranean societies which have ensured their own demise by operating according to Mediterranean values of corruption and ineptitude. The analysis of this collapse is not a simplistic survey of the reasons that may have lead to these circumstances, as they are all partial and inadequate in justifying the past two decades of progressive failure, but is rather a sharpened and angered acknowledgment of the cultural inability to rebel, to generate change, or to alter a course that has been set forth by ‘other forces.’ It is this miserable existence—between the inability to resurge caused by a lack of self-criticism and the constant shifting of blame while waiting for yet again another political savior—that the curator attacks via a critique that refuses to take prisoners.</p>
<p>This critique visualizes a Mediterranean both engulfed in flames and lit by the flashing colored lights of parties—as in the opening scenes of <i>The Great Beauty</i> (<i>La Grande Bellezza</i>, 2013)—that celebrate with the twitching of bodies in the engulfing flames and lights not the end of life, but the last throes of death. Summer is at an end, and the only thing left is the cultural trash upon which we celebrate the iconicity of de-valued and de-moralized existences.</p>
<p>Through detailed analysis of Balaskas’s works and related exhibition, Aceti lashes out against contemporary societies and examines how each artwork pins to the wall the hypocrisies, platitudes, and certainties of a world at its wits end.</p>
<p><i>Remainders at the End of a Summer Bliss</i> is one of several chapters included in a forthcoming book entitled <i>End of a Summer Bliss</i>.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/i7u78H-ds8E" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/12/remainders-at-the-end-of-a-summer-bliss/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=60372018-03-02T21:38:15Z2017-11-28T20:03:01Z<p><em>It&#8217;s Time</em> is a conversation between Prof. Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths and Harvard) and Prof. Lanfranco Aceti (MIT and BU) on issues of <em>time</em> and its relationship to the contemporary databased and mediated narratives. The lecture will take place in the Plimpton Room, Barker Center, Room 133, Harvard University on Monday, December 4, 2017, from 6:30pm to 8:00 pm.</p>
<p>Inspired by Italo Calvino&#8217;s <em>Six Memos for the Next Millennium</em> and Umberto Eco’s <em>S</em><em>ix </em><em>Walks in the F</em><em>ictional </em><em>Woods, </em>part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at the Mahindra Humanities Center, the conversation will be published by MIT Press as part of larger project that analyzes issues of time, space, movement, matter, light, and the unknown. The volume will be using a new publication platform, <a href="https://cac.pubpub.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Contemporary Arts and Cultures (CAC)</a>, realized by <a href="https://www.media.mit.edu/people/trich/projects/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Travis Rich</a> at the MediaLab that LEA has been experimenting with as part of its experimental remits within MIT Press.</p>
<p>“This motif can also be interpreted as an allegory of narrative time and the way in which it cannot be measured against real time. And the same significance can be seen in the reverse operation, in the expanding of time by the internal proliferations from one story to another, which is a feature of oriental storytelling.” [1]<div class="fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box hundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling" style='background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);background-position: center center;background-repeat: no-repeat;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;'></div><div class="fusion-builder-row fusion-row "></div><div class="fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion_builder_column_1_1 fusion-one-full fusion-column-first fusion-column-last fusion-column-no-min-height 1_1" style='margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;'>
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<p>Prof. Cubitt will analyze motifs and structures that are emerging from the contemporary usage of databases as archives of times and time based narratives. These are engineered structures that simultaneously appear to liberate from and freeze in time images and their narratives.</p>
<p>What are, then, the old media structures that can be still recognized as metaphors and “rearview mirrors” (Marshall McLuhan) in our twenty-first century data driven societies? And what is the role of time in the complexity of representation and narratives that characterize individual and social phenomena?</p>
<p>[1] Italo Calvino, <em>Six Memos for the Next Millennium</em>, trans. Patrick Creagh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 37.</p>
<p>This event is graciously supported by the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University, Contemporary Arts and Cultures, Operational and Curatorial Research, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and MIT Press.</p>
<p>With thanks to the Mahindra Humanities Center.</p>
<p>Event coordinator: Candice Bancheri.</p>
<p>Biography</p>
<p><strong>Sean Cubitt</strong> teaches and writes about the history and philosophy of media, and is especially interested in environmentalism, media technologies, media arts and political aesthetics. He has worked in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA and has ongoing research collaborations and honorary appointments at the Universities of Melbourne and Oslo. Sean is on the editorial boards of a number of journals and is a series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His most recent books are <em>Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Media</em> and <em>The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technology from Prints to Pixels</em>. He is also half of the thriller-writing team Lambert Nagle.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/IT6y1fVb-gs" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/11/its-time/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=60112018-02-06T18:36:59Z2017-10-30T13:15:47Z<p><a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a> presents a painterly and sculptural text work by Dutch artist, <a href="http://willemjansmit.nl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Willem Jan Smit</a>. At the Sculpture Garden pavilion on the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki, Smit marries the two media with the complexity of the positive and negative architectural space.</p>
<p>“The Sculpture Garden pavilion presents and shines a light on a fissure in the homogeneous representation of the community,” explains the artist. “The pavilion proposes a narrative of the unlikely rendered possible. It is a fiction and a reality at once. During the installation of the work, passersby would approach to ask for clarification on the nature of the development, filling in the blanks themselves and projecting their own unfulfilled desires. The fictional aspect of the work is about what may be coming soon or what the imagined scenario of this development could entail. Who will be using the space and what sort of community will it house? The reality is that new possibilities—unthinkable and not thought yet—are now open for exploration. This exchange creates an aesthetic fiction on the edge of reality.”</p>
<p>The artist’s concern with the disappearance of public spaces within which communities have been able to congregate, organize, and advance their agendas plays with the presence of multiple pavilions across the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki. The Sculpture Garden pavilion in the hands of the artist becomes a community statement of what may be possible, raising the expectation that something new may be housed in it in response to the needs of the community.</p>
<p>“<i>It Is Conceivable that She Will Refuse</i>, is a layered artwork that plays in between the public and private spaces—explains the curator Lanfranco Aceti, <a href="http://act.mit.edu/people/affiliates/lanfranco-aceti/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">research affiliate and visiting professor at Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) in the Department of Architecture at MIT.</a> The artist has been able to render visible the role of the ‘public house’ and its relationship to state legislation and its restrictions. It is a piercing of the architectonical space through which it is possible to see the failed negotiations at play—between unimaginable homes and the heteronormative restrictions imposed by a public arena.”</p>
<p>The aims of the artist are oriented towards the nurturing of a future wherein true emancipation and equal rights—regardless of race, sexual preference, or economic status—are conceivable for all beings, particularly those who are currently living under suspended or partial citizenship. Smit, moving from the Dutch experience of lesbian couples wanting to conceive via IVF—a successfully resolved issue in the Netherlands but not in Greece—extrapolated the general notion of <i>conceivable</i> in order to analyze the unthinkable that can be conceived and realized within the public space.</p>
<p>The artwork is constructed as a believable fiction—a conceivable space within which unthinkable possibilities of the public sphere are fertilized for evolution. This process allows the unimaginable and unimagined homes and family lives—gendered, racially, and economically excluded—to be included within the urban texture.</p>
<p>The artist has chosen to insert a questionable scenario, proposed equally in text as in material, about what is conceivable. The text is dubious because the subject is indistinct. What we do know is that the main character identifies as feminine and that it is possible for her to have her own will, but her primary trait is that she has free will, which poses the question, what are the oppressive forces on this feminine subject? The material suggests change, not necessarily progress, through the possibility of economic growth or investment. It also foregrounds typically gendered labour, window washing, erasure, and the ceaseless production of cleanliness. The painted windows function within the realm of scenography and are a common indicator that an interior is being modified, one can expect the establishment to open again soon respawning question of: “What is to come?”</p>
<p>For the Thessaloniki Biennial and their chosen theme, <i>Imagined Homes</i>, a progression of the imaginable spaces sparked imaginable community centres, pubs, clubs, raves, and lesbian, gay, and trans bars. The question of what is to come could be presented as the idea of the inclusion of the excluded collectives. <i>Imagined Homes</i> prompted the thinkable presence of the unheard minorities in the public sphere.</p>
<p>Conceivable is the operative word in this painterly and sculptural installation which, based on Merriam-Webster’s dictionary sample sentence, “It is conceivable that she will refuse to go,” was shortened to imply and implicate innumerable scenographies and scenarios—once unthinkable—to be conceived as possible.</p>
<p><i>It Is Conceivable that She Will Refuse </i>was realized with the support of The Museum of Contemporary Cuts, Arts Administration at Boston University, and the Friends of Thessaloniki’s New Waterfront Association.</p>
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<p><strong>Artist Bio</strong></p>
<p><strong>Willem Jan Smit </strong>(NL, ES) is a contemporary artist and activist who is exhibiting internationally. Currently his work can be viewed at the Athens School of Fine Arts annex in Hydra and at Beton7 in Athens. Smit largely works in sculpture and installation though his practice, conceptually based, will assume whatever necessary form depending on each project’s requirements. Text and painting play an increasing role in his practice. His latest intervention was, Ad Nauseam, at documenta 14, shortly after a solo exhibition, <i>They Were Shown the Door in a Matter of Minutes</i>, in Athens as part of the Platforms Project for the Museum of Contemporary Cuts. For the fall he is engaging in a series of public works the first of which will be during the Thessaloniki Biennial. He studied in Vancouver, Canada with Liz Magor, Geoffrey Farmer, and Garry Neill Kennedy. His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.</p>
<p><strong>Curator Bio</strong></p>
<p><strong>Lanfranco Aceti</strong> works as a curator, artist, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ MIT and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. As curator he previously worked as director of Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, where he exhibited a range of innovative artworks including <i>75Watts</i> by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, acquired by MoMA and Paolo Cirio’s <i>Loophole4All</i>, awarded the 2014 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. Recently, he curated <i>End of a Summer Bliss</i> at the Kalfayan Gallery, as well as <i>The Small Infinite</i> at the John Hansard Gallery with artworks never previously exhibited from the estate of John Latham. Lanfranco Aceti has participated in numerous art fairs such as Art Athina, Art International, Supermarket, and Contemporary Istanbul, either as a curator or as an artist. In 2011, he curated the exhibition <i>Uncontainable </i>as part of the parallel events of the 12th Istanbul Biennial and exhibited artworks on the media facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. In 2016, he curated a range of artworks as part of <i>THE SOCIAL</i> at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other public spaces in Boston and London. In June 2017, he curated a new public performance, <i>One Step Forward Two Steps Back,</i> by Stefanos Tsivopoulos on the White House sidewalk in collaboration with the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University. He is currently curating <i>Empty Pr(oe)mises</i> for the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/N7ybrteSxRI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/10/it-is-conceivable-she-will-refuse/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=59822018-02-06T18:37:00Z2017-10-23T15:48:10Z<p>Supported by the <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a>, the Mediterranean Garden pavilion on the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki has a contemporary art installation by Lanfranco Aceti, curated by Camilla Boemio. Known internationally for his socio-political stances and performances that have taken place over the past thirty years, the artist has conceived a site-specific installation that engages directly with the theme of the Thessaloniki Biennale, <i>Imagined Homes.</i> He has created a public window into the dismantling of contemporary society, its crisis and the consequences on the private home. Through the metaphorical and physical act of ‘airing the dirty laundry,’ the artworks speak of engendered social frameworks, body conflicts, and political individual freedoms that have been dismantled and betrayed.</p>
<p>“I wanted to address this crisis as a breakup between lovers,” explains the artist. “It is the end of the relationship between two people, one of whom embodies the nation-state and the other the collective citizens. It is the aftermath of a quarrel and the lovers have separated. They are both leaving the roof under which they shared dreams, hopes, and cares. The nation-state—embodied in a physical person—is constructed and imagined as a selfish patriarchal, individualistic, and immature man. The people—conceived as one single feminine body—are imagined as a woman with matriarchal values of community, self-sacrifice, and support.”</p>
<p>In the imagined narrative of the artist, the lovers are parting ways. The artworks contain a frozen moment in which objects—once expressed as tangible metaphors of partnership and living in the home—are now being divided and discarded. What is left of this relationship is on public display in the Mediterranean Garden pavilion within which Aceti, by engaging with the architectural elements, creates reflections of visible and invisible spaces tracing the lines between private, semi-private, semi-public, and public engagement. The remainders of the relationship are the artworks made of discarded sheets that bare the traces of the bodies and the now forgotten relationship. These are objects that are disposed of, thrown out from the window of a private home onto the street. The dirty sheets, soiled with bodily fluids, are not only a record of a past relationship but also simulacra of a social and political collapse of wider relationships in the Mediterranean. The sheets and the writings upon them offer—in contradictory terms—both a visible public record of the violent oppression of living together and the hope for the possibilities offered by the re-acquisition of freedom. The writings on the sheets are curses that can be addressed to anyone by substituting <em><div class="fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box hundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling" style='background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);background-position: center center;background-repeat: no-repeat;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;'><div class="fusion-builder-row fusion-row "><div class="fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion_builder_column_1_1 fusion-one-full fusion-column-first fusion-column-last fusion-column-no-min-height 1_1" style='margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;'>
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[insert name]</em> with a name of choice. Similar to ancient pre-written curses the writings painted on the sheets act as a container within which the viewers can insert their own narratives.</p>
<p>The Mediterranean Garden pavilion acts, in the artist’s narrative, as a coded and decodable cabinet of curiosities and narratives in a game of reflections between the inside and the outside—challenging the idea of inconsequential actions and legacies between lovers or between the state and its citizens. For the artist, it is risible that an offense has no bearing or consequences in a relationship; also risible is the notion that the economic crisis has had little impact on the conceptual and physical construction of the home on all levels of private and public engagement. The artworks unveil their long-term effects on relationships and homes that are now characterized as destabilized, wrecked, or destroyed. Women remain at the center of this engendered crisis resulting from patriarchal and phallic values of greed, pillaging, and inconsequentiality. The consequences in the Mediterranean context heavily weigh upon women’s ability to reconstruct homes and bring back together a torn apart society via their capacity for familial, professional, and social engagement.</p>
<p>Politically seduced, contractually violated, and solicitously abandoned to a destiny of misery by a selfish lover, the narrative of the artworks presents an apparent future that is made of tears and a painfully eked out living. This is juxtaposed to the emotionally charged painted curses which also speak of response, action, and reaction, and invite viewers to rethink and take advantage of the multiple possibilities offered by the now severed responsibilities of the wrecked home.</p>
<p>The title of the installation, <i>Knock, Knock, Knocking,</i> speaks directly to the lover and the nation-state. “I wanted people to remember the name of a selfish lover and for them to identify that name with the nation-state as a means to make the installation relevant to personal instances and narratives of defeat and rebirth. As an artist, I wanted for this breakup to have a clear emotional comparison—an actual physical embodiment in the dirty bed sheets which air in public the traces of the physical body. We have all separated with a lover and experienced the feeling of rejection and hurt. This is the feeling that people are currently experiencing in the Mediterranean due to the betrayal and complete disregard for the very basic notions of the social contract by the nation-state.”</p>
<p>For Aceti, society has stopped existing a long time ago, The Mediterranean Garden pavilion, with its architectonical cabinet of curiosities, offers the possibility of the impossible—the simplest of ideas, that another life may be possible without this nation-state or “moron of a lover.”</p>
<p>As we are so often taught to not ‘air our dirty laundry,’ the installation antithetically brings into the public space—via curses and bodily fluids—expressions of anger and hatred towards a situation that it is commonly expected to be dealt with only privately. The artworks embody personal feelings and speak directly to the sentiments of betrayal, abuse, and violation. The artist stresses the importance of embodiment in order to ensure that anger can lead to severance and rebirth through the redefinition of one’s identity both personally and politically.</p>
<p>“I wish for this anger to be directed towards a person in order to ensure that they—the selfish politicians of this nation-state—will not come back knocking at my door with ideas of social responsibility, service, and community participation. If these concepts have no value in a free market society, then there is no reason for me to engage any longer. As post-citizens within post-democracies, we no longer have any responsibility toward a nation-state that has moved beyond the idea of social contract. If we live in post-nation-states, requests for my social responsibility, service, and community participation have to be acquired through payments in hard cash, since we are paying for a miserable existence in these advanced-capitalistic societies. Yes, the message of the artwork to the ex-lover and the ex-state is that we are moving on and please don’t come knocking!”</p>
<p><i>Knock, Knock, Knocking </i>was realized with the support of The Museum of Contemporary Cuts, Arts Administration at Boston University, and the Friends of Thessaloniki’s New Waterfront Association.</p>
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<p><b>Artist Bio</b></p>
<p><b>Lanfranco Aceti</b> works as an artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ MIT and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including <i>Car Park, </i>a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; <i>Who The People?</i> an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; <i>Sowing and Reaping</i>, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and <i>Hope Coming On</i> a site-specific choral performance he designed with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and realized in front of Turner’s <i>Slave Ship</i>. In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled <i>Shimmer</i> and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&amp;A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled <i>Accursed</i> for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and <i>Knock, Knock, Knocking</i> a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.</p>
<p><b>Curators’ Bio</b></p>
<p><b>Camilla Boemio</b> is a writer, curator, university consultant and theorist whose practice deals with investigating the politics of participation in curatorial practices, the intersection of culture, the social architecture, politics and contemporary aesthetics. In 2016, she was the curator of <i>Diminished Capacity</i> the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. In 2017 In 2017, she curated <i>Delivering Obsolescence: Art Bank, Data Bank, Food Bank</i> a Special Project at the 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art. Boemio co-founded, with Fabrizio Orsini, and directed the thematic AAC Platform in Rome. She is member of AICA (International Association of Arts Critics) and she is curator at Artist Pension Trust.<div class="fusion-clearfix"></div>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/rdkyf2UJm2Q" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/10/knockknock/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=59782018-02-06T18:37:00Z2017-10-10T21:07:06Z<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What is in a curse? And who are the accursed? The artist, Lanfranco Aceti, has created a performance titled </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Accursed</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and curated by Areti Leopolou that addresses the theme of the Thessaloniki Biennale, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Imagined Homes,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by bringing the privacy of the home into the public space. The accursed plebs—lower class and middle class alike—voice their angers and frustrations at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall in the form of curses addressed to the state, politicians, financiers, and everyone else involved in the post-modern dismantling of the idea of socially rooted matriarchal values of collaboration, sharing, participation, service, and care. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Twelve women between the age of fifty and seventy years old will form a semicircle laying bare objects from the privacy of their homes. Armchairs, side tables, and crystal vases placed in the public space symbolize the idea of a specific home inherited from the second part of the twentieth century; one made of useless rendered sacrifices, betrayed by upward social mobility and deluded dreams of social existence. The twelve women are surrounded by the Thessaloniki Chorus which will be singing an acapella version of a composition collated by the artist from </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lamentationes Prophetae Jeremiae</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lamentation</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of Christos Samaras.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The history of curses in the Mediterranean goes back thousands of years to the invocations for misfortune on enemies, real and imagined, asked of Greek and Roman gods. The invocations are for love, economics, and political issues, creating a layered landscape in which the private and the public blend in the desperation of the lives of those accursed and cursing. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">By expressing their unmitigated frustrations in the form of curses, the performers will break the lament of the chorus in order to articulate vulgarity, anger, and a sense of freedom based on the certainty that nothing else is left to lose—not even dignity since this is a construct of the body politic to restrain and control with values and morals, behaviors and resistance both within the public and private realms. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The artist conceives the relationship between these twelve women and the state as a very personal one, in which the state is a person and the idea of sufferance in privacy is subverted and rendered loudly public. Aceti argues that the body politics and the millennial continuous reference to the state as a body/person—a physical prerogative more recently acquired by corporations but started by Agrippa Menenius Lanatus in 494 B.C.—requires today a personal response that is clearly emotive, irrational, emotional, and uterine. This response has to be manifested beyond and outside the phallic boundaries set by the patriarchal state and recover its original matriarchal cavernous chthonian roots. It is an aesthetic approach that wears the millennial insults towards matriarchy and its social frameworks as a badge of honor publicly stated to incise within the public realm the idea and role of a different social approach so often disparaged in the name of the failed ideologies of free market and unethical economics.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The inferno in which ‘plebs’ have been and are being condemned to is the same inferno within which these people—moronic politicians, shitty financiers, and corporate fuckwads—deserve to be condemned to by these publicly imposed curses. Aceti invited the twelve women to either author their own curses or adopt the ones he wrote, imagining how to punish and torture those at the helm of contemporary society’s corrosion, as if they were in a contemporary Dantesque inferno. The artist’s curses speak of thousands of elephants on viagra raping the ass of a politician, of guts ripped out and dragged away by cats and dogs, and of the rotten shitty flesh of children’s sweet cheeks. </span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Accursed</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, as a performance, is all about shifting the idea of who is on the receiving end of a curse: the dismantling of society cannot just affect ‘neo-plebs’ and ‘post-citizens’ but is a rebounding curse that will render corrupt politicians—at some point in time—accursed. No longer submitted to structures of power and control, at least as a new ideological framework, people—as post-citizens—are free to reimagine their own individuality and the frameworks for new societal norms. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The conclusion,” writes Michel Foucault “would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state&#8217;s institutions, but to liberate both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.” <div class="fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box hundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling" style='background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);background-position: center center;background-repeat: no-repeat;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;'><div class="fusion-builder-row fusion-row "><div class="fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion_builder_column_1_1 fusion-one-full fusion-column-first fusion-column-last fusion-column-no-min-height 1_1" style='margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;'>
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[1] </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“It is time—explains the artist—to show some guts: either our guts or the guts of those who have caused and continue to cause this mayhem in order to preserve privileges and entitlements. A curse is an apotropaically vulgar and absolutely fantastical expression of feelings and desires that most likely will never happen. In repressed Western society where people are condemned to the obligation of hypocritical optimism in public and to the capitalistic misery of depression, solitude, and anger at home, the opportunity for the voiceless to voice their apotropaic wishes publicly is one that offers a moment of imaginary revenge, the possibility for social re-engagement, and the opportunity to make a public stand.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the fraying fabric of contemporary society there is a process of reaction that argues for a returning to a </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">status quo ante</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">—that of an ideal state as a body within which society perhaps existed—which is identifiable with a fascistic return to a golden age. This performance is not a lamentation and a commiseration for what has happened, it is a public voicing of silenced private feelings restricted to the home. It is a rally to launch a woman’s cavernous cry for war. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">[1] Michel Foucault, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Power</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">: </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Essential Works of Foucault</span></i> <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">1954-1984</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et. al. (New York: The New Press, 2000), 336.</span></p>
<p>Poster Design: Deniz Cem Onduygu, <a href="http://www.fevkalade.net" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://www.fevkalade.net</a>.</p>
<p>Images: Lanfranco Aceti, <em>Accursed</em>, 2017. Installation and performance, Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. Photography: pSari visual, <a href="http://www.psari-visual.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" data-lynx-mode="origin" data-lynx-uri="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.psari-visual.com%2F&amp;h=ATNsJnbLkhXY6Mj9c7HdkJoxMJ32VbwBre2IXVPJhEweRvuk_udGKO2RyyvK_W_5sF8LzJGuFHPTUMC34DpazZ1Zrc3Ia2kD1GFFvsViXCyZh53OmmOnKxqjs5R4-eVidUwwI5_HuTihXLYMe1kBcmR3d1E_eHAOfqdxnjiDc9s0JBHEa2XFFgzuVTdH0O3zAi2LiUWV1Y7Szg0WPzTNpjCa4WE0STGAfoJkh52Skp-YalaXNR1syq8">www.psari-visual.com.</a></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The performance program </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">ACCURSED</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> took place in the framework of the Thessaloniki Performance Festival. The festival is part of the Main Program of the 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art which is organized by the State Museum of Contemporary Art and co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund).</span></p>
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<p><a href="http://thessalonikibiennale.gr" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art</span></a></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Imagined Homes”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">30.09.2017-14.01.2018</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">www.thessalonikibiennale.gr</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For the performance </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Accursed</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, realized on October 13, 2017, Thessaloniki Concert Hall, 7 pm to 10 pm, special thanks to the Thessaloniki Concert Hall Organisation and to the Mixed Choir of Thessaloniki: Artistic Director for </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Accursed</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Mary Konstantinidis. Performers: Aquili Claudia, Bouloni Olga, Gazi Marilia, Kakkou Yetta, Kimpiri Popi, Kliroporou Dimitra, Panagiotara Maria, Papadaki Mariangela, Saltiel Eleni, Sariani Nicola, Simeonidou Eleni, and Skoumbourdi Tommy.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Artist Bio</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lanfranco Aceti works as an artist, curator, and academic. He is a <a href="http://act.mit.edu/people/affiliates/lanfranco-aceti/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ MIT</a> and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">He has exhibited numerous personal projects including </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Car Park, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Who The People?</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sowing and Reaping</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hope Coming On</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a site-specific choral performance he designed with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and realized in front of Turner’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Slave Ship</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shimmer</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&amp;A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Accursed</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">knock, knock, knocking</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.</span></p>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/r3auOCOKh0o" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/10/accursed/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=59632018-02-06T18:37:01Z2017-09-21T10:15:13Z<p>To ‘celebrate’ the forthcoming conflict between Rocket Man of North Korea and Dotard of the United States of America the artist <a href="http://www.public-preposition.net">Mischa Kuball</a> (DE) has been commissioned to create an installation and music score to be placed on <a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2017/01/the-fifth-column/"><i>The Fifth Column</i></a> of the White House. Named <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/who-is-cotus/">Curator Of The United States (COTUS)</a> by the <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a>, Lanfranco Aceti announced this new video and installation as part of <i>The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards</i> art project at the White House.</p>
<p>Aceti explained, “Kuball has suspended over <i>The Fifth Column</i> on the north lawn of the White House two drumsticks that play an electronically revisited version of the <i>Radetzky March</i>. Issues related to the throes of collapsing empires and the destruction that accompany their falls oblige contemporary viewers to take notice of the twisted marching of patriarchal idiotic rhetorics of war. Twisted tweets and insults are the quotidian background beat of the de-construction of a world descending into the madness of Fascism. This is a fascistic world in which people have a responsibility via their a-critical resigned participation, cowardly derelictions monumentalized in persistent silence, or fake revolutionary stances out of convenience.”</p>
<p>“This solemn new march will give the beat to the continuous threats and always impending confrontation between North Korea and the United States of America is unveiling the real measurements of tiny hands and tiny minds,” Lanfranco Aceti explained. “We are in contact with numerous schools in the US and across the world in order to have the march played every morning for opening classes, but also to mark the beginning of everyone’s daily activities in the public and private workplaces. A petition has been presented to the American Congress for the march to substitute the current national hymn.”</p>
<p>Mischa Kuball, <i>Drums for the President of USA</i>, (Radetzky-March), 2017, follows previous installations on <i>The Fifth Column</i>, with artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Grayson Perry, and Sarah Lucas.</p>
<p>Aceti explained that Kuball had been chosen because of his artistic practice which, spanning over 40 years, has faced up to the challenges of artworks in public spaces and uncomfortable social themes and issues.</p>
<p>“As #COTUS,” Aceti concludes, “I have been contacting a number of international artists and making poignant selections which reflect the spirit of contemporary political art, activism, and aesthetics. Countercurrent to a partisan criticism rooted in political ideas of moral superiority and divinely inspired righteousness, the artworks chosen question at large the framework which have characterized the past two thousand years of history and that, unequivocally, continue to be repeated—cyclically and blindly—across time, geographical areas, political landscapes, and pseudo-cultural contexts. It is in this unreasonable presence of the reality of the unimaginable characterizing this turn of the twentieth-first century that outlandish artistic and curatorial projects find their raison d’être as rational counterpoints to the decline of collective social reasoning.”</p>
<p><i>Drums for the President of USA</i> will stand on <i>The Fifth Column</i> for the next forty-nine days, after which it will be substituted by a new artwork selected by Lanfranco Aceti, Curator Of The United States or #COTUS.</p>
<p><a href="http://mischakuball.com/information.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Mischa Kuball’s Bio</a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/lanfranco-aceti/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lanfranco Aceti’s Bio</a></p>
<p><a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a></p>
<p>#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards #warpigs #mischakuball</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/X3U_CA_Xa08" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/09/war-pigs/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=59572018-02-06T18:37:01Z2017-09-20T14:23:54Z<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“<div class="fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box hundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling" style='background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);background-position: center center;background-repeat: no-repeat;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;'><div class="fusion-builder-row fusion-row "><div class="fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion_builder_column_1_1 fusion-one-full fusion-column-first fusion-column-last fusion-column-no-min-height 1_1" style='margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;'>
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[&#8230;.] there are all the folds that come from the Orient­—Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, classical folds &#8230;. But it twists and turns the folds, takes them to infinity, fold upon fold, fold after fold. [&#8230;.] is the fold that goes on to infini­ty.” Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold,” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yale French Studies</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> 80, Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy (1991): 227. </span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Where Is the Problem? ‘Empathy &#8211; Apathy’</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is a new group exhibition at Beton7, Athens, curated by Eva Kekou, that sees the participation of Lanfranco Aceti (IT, UK, US) and Willem Jan Smit (NL, DE, ES) together with Eirene Efstathiou, Yiannis Theodoropoulos, Anna Lascari, and Stefania Strouza. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lanfranco Aceti and Willem Jan Smit present three new artworks as part of their summer long conversation on the complexity of contemporary artistic practices that reflect upon social and identity issues. The three artworks were produced specifically for Beton7 and one of them was realized in situ as part of the collaborative and community based approach that the two artists wanted to explore over the course of an entire summer. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lanfranco Aceti, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Biggr The Bettr</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, 2017. Hand stitched sequins on silk, 40x60cm.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Willem Jan Smit, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">NOT TOO BIG</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, 2017. Reversible sequins fabric and hangers,120x220cm.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Willem Jan Smit and Lanfranco Aceti, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Men Smear</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, 2017. Nails, rubber gloves, and crude oil rub from Piraeus spill on found tarpaulin, 130x170cm.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The three artworks responded to the philosophical framework set by the curator who explained that the chosen titled </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Where Is the Problem?</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> linked “the local with the world, the special with the general. It refers to sarcasm and humour in order to deal with problems in ‘societies in crisis’ and ‘transition societies’ which remain inactive and passive, often developing a bipolar and ambivalent attitude to the problems they face.” </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aceti and Smit linked philosophical, economic, and gender issues focusing on how we perceive size and construct our relations in terms of size within contemporary globalized societies. By mixing contemporary events, the oil spill on the coastline of Athens, and the individual relationship to the concept of ‘big’, is bigger really better?, the two artists generated a visual conversation between three aesthetically different artworks which fundamentally question the basis of our social engagements. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The exhibition can be visited from Tuesday 19 September to Friday 13 October, 2017 at Beton7, Athens, Greece. Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 2 PM – 7 PM. Opening: Tuesday September 19th, 8 PM.</span><div class="fusion-clearfix"></div>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/ubq8X40pqO8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>1http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/09/where-is-the-problem/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=59752018-02-06T18:37:02Z2017-09-12T10:41:16Z<p><em>SHIMMER</em> is a new solo show by Lanfranco Aceti and Willem Jan Smit who came together under the curatorial framework of Irini Papadimitriou, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The two artists merged their aesthetic practices for <em>SHIMMER</em> and generated for the <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a> and the Athens School of Fine Arts in Hydra (GR) a scathing visual analysis of contemporary political art. The exhibition takes place from September 12, 2017 to October 15, 2017.</p>
<p>“The foundation for the defiance in contemporary art practices of activism and art actionism—explain the artists—clashes against social constructs which conspire to blind us to socio-economic exploitation via artists posing as activists through socially mediated platforms for a sprite of screen time or a couple hundred likes.”</p>
<p>It is in this context of aesthetic egotistic Hollywoodification of champagne socialists, click activists, and re-upholstered armchair revolutionaries that the exercise of fashionable prepubescent anger—as a response to the processes of exploitation and necropolitics of nation states—has to be delivered as an optimistic and benign participatory visual message. This is a message that is prettily aestheticized and homophonically heteronormative in relation to the sound of the chorus within which artists are singing the same uninspiring dribbling and re-ingested vomit produced by the same corporate hymn sheet.</p>
<p>Trapped in the swampy glue of contemporary social media and <em>impossibilitated</em> to counteract the hypermediated and metastructures spewed by institutional taxonomies for hunting, trapping, and cataloging behaviors and human activities, the functional aesthetic response is the soiling of oneself with the shimmering of superficial blindness of Arcadian landscapes, shining objects, and the glistening of bodily fluids.</p>
<p>It is in these post-capitalistic ideological failures that the Mediterranean—as a regional and variegated cultural area bent over to corruption, loosely connected and still so similar in its hypersexually inspired patriarchal servitude despite its multitude of differences—flaunts about beauty not as solace but as a weapon in the hands of others and by which to be pierced. Blinded by an obvious aesthetic of oblivion conjured by the silvery shimmer of waters—which renders vision both blind and starry—the complex inheritances of borders, routes, and narratives, sinks in the depths of a sea of darkness covered by the bedazzling light of incessantly and collectively regurgitated reflections. Not much is left to see below the reflective surface of contemporary necropolitics which make of their liquidity and constant changing sparkles an attractive shining body of obfuscating lights.</p>
<p>The awareness of this blinding quality of the Mediterranean waters and their metaphors is at the core of the exhibition <em>SHIMMER</em> in Hydra. The phenomenon of shimmering is presented by the artists as an experience that does not unveil but conceals, making it impossible to reveal the fullness of contemporary sorrowful experiences.</p>
<p>Accustomed to suffering— as a constant process of plunging from one crisis into another, political failure to political failure, falling of an empire into the rising of a new one—the socio-political Mediterranean understanding of life is characterized by a staring in the blinding light of the sun reflected upon the sea. The wavering and weaving process of post-capitalistic narratives of uncertainty exists—in the Mediterranean context—within the certainty of the inscrutability of the undercurrents of events that remain invisible to the naked eye but not for this reason less known or felt in the destructive strength of their invisible forces. These are objects that the artists present as shimmering superficial constructs concealing their darker and deeper nature.</p>
<p><strong>LANFRANCO ACETI</strong> (IT, UK, US) is an artist, curator, and academic. He has exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennale, the Thessaloniki Biennial, and numerous other galleries and museums. He is visiting professors at ACT@MIT and professor at Boston University. His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.</p>
<p><strong>WILLEM JAN SMIT</strong> (NL, ES, DE) is a contemporary artist and activist who has exhibited internationally. He has shown in Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Greece, and the United States. His latest intervention was, ad nauseam, at Documenta 14. His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.</p>
<p><strong>IRINI PAPADIMITRIOU</strong> (GR, UK) is a curator, producer and cultural manager, working at the forefront of digital culture. Irini works at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Watermans gallery. She also collaborates with the British Council Creative Economy.</p>
<p>1 Lanfranco Aceti, <em>the Biggr the Bettr</em>, 2017. Sequins on stretched silk, 40x60cm.</p>
<p>2 Willem Jan Smit, <em>Not Too Big</em>, 2017. Reversible sequins fabric and garment hangers, 120x240cm.</p>
<p>3 Willem Jan Smit, <em>Blow Me</em>, 2017. Reversible sequins fabric and garment hangers, 140x300cm.</p>
<p>4 Lanfranco Aceti &amp; Willem Jan Smit, <em>Fuck the Fucking Arcadia</em>, 2017. Local shopping bags, 212 x 285cm.</p>
<p>5 Lanfranco Aceti, <em>I Will Keep Forgetting You Every Single Day</em>, 2017. Found text on linen, ink and shimmery gold paint, not too big, suitable to decorate apartments.</p>
<p>6 Lanfranco Aceti,<em> Throwing Shimmery Shade</em>, 2017. Reclaimed chairs from Mandraki dump, mylar tape on parasol, 200x188cm.</p>
<p>7 Willem Jan Smit, <em>Sweet Dreams, Fais de Beaux Reves, Óneira Glyká</em>, 2017. Rope from nearby chapel, dimensions variable, string theory.</p>
<p>8 Lanfranco Aceti, <em>Spa Day</em>, 2017. Performance with mule and youth.</p>
<p>9 Lanfranco Aceti &amp; Willem Jan Smit, <em>The Rehydration of Hydra aka Snakes on a Ladder, Straight Off the Plane</em>, 2017. Iron can, ladder from the water processing plant in Mandraki ditch, garden hose, couplings, metal wire, spray heads and water.</p>
<p>10 Willem Jan Smit, <em>Yammer Yammer, Bad Mammer Jammer</em>, 2017. Farewell performance with megaphone.</p>
<p>11 Lanfranco Aceti &amp; Willem Jan Smit, <em>Miss Congeniality</em>, 2017. Garbage bag runners from mansion windows. Sized to the building.</p>
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<p>Many thanks to the Athens School of Fine Arts and the participating students without whom this project would not have been realised so graciously.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/-_HLwn4_5Ys" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/09/shimmer/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=59672018-02-06T18:37:02Z2017-08-03T09:08:46Z<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In a contemporary world of suppositions presented as a healthy suppository of systemically administered fact, the current exchange and special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States of America is providing exciting new prospects. The UK has proposed to offer </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Oboddaddy 1,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by Sarah Lucas, as an instrument of justice to beat down efforts of fake news and propaganda alike. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Oboddaddy 1</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, a giant pink phallic shaped sculpture, can also be used as an instrument of punishment and retribution. Currently, there is discussion between the White House and the UK Prime Minister to order those guilty of propagating falsehoods and untruths to sit on it. Similar to the public shaming of the pillory, Sarah Lucas’s ‘knob’—part of an exhibition aptly titled </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Penetralia</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">—would act as an artwork, an instrument of justice, and a public performance. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/who-is-cotus/">Lanfranco Aceti #COTUS (Curator Of The United States)</a>, who chose Sarah Lucas for this particular installation at the White House, said that the artwork “blended several media including participatory performance.” “It will be so exciting,” stated the artist, ”to see people dragged on the North Lawn of the White House to meet their fate. It will be even more interesting to see politicians who fall foul of this new ordinance, to be punished in such a public,interactive, and spectacular way. My concern is that the initial inspiration that is community based and for a common good might be re-oriented toward capitalistic monetization and economic exploitation—a </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Disneyfication</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hollywoodization</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of the events, with the selling of popcorn, soda, and pork chop on a stick, more focused on entertainment than a moment of reflection on the importance of truth and its definition.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Lucas’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Oboddaddy 1 </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">(2010) follows preceding installations on </span><a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/01/the-fifth-column/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Fifth Column</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of artists like Maurizio Cattelan and Grayson Perry.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aceti explained, “Lucas has been chosen because of her artistic practice which since the 1990s has proven to carry, as Ken Johnson writes in The New York Times, “a deeper resonance, which comes from how they connect the viscerally low-minded and the intellectually high.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“As #COTUS,” Aceti concludes, “I am extremely proud of having been afforded this opportunity and having chosen Sarah Lucas’s artwork. Although Lucas could be identified as a feminist artist, her artworks carry the beauty and hypocrisy of contemporary heteronormative society. They exist as a reminder of other things that have been eliminated from the picture. Accusations of vulgarity towards Lucas’s work have remained unfounded because the artworks—if compared to contemporary social behaviours and sexual practices—appear rather elegant and full of composure. The same can not be said, however, for the vulgarity with which we are constantly subjected to by our institutions, politicians, and fellow citizens. It is my hope that, once the law is enacted, the ceremony of pillory of condemned common citizens and politicians alike will be called </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Penetralia</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in homage to the artist who has provided this wonderful instrument.”</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Oboddaddy 1</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> will stand on </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Fifth Column</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for the next forty-nine days, after which it will be substituted by a new artwork selected by Lanfranco Aceti, Curator Of The United States or #COTUS.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Suppository is, as stated in the Oxford Dictionary, “A medicinal preparation, typically in the form of a small, solid cone or cylinder of a base material that becomes soft or liquid at body temperature, administered by insertion into the rectum, vagina, or urethra (or, esp. in early use, any body orifice other than the mouth).”</span></p>
<p><a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sarah-lucas-2643"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Lucas’s Bio</span></a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/lanfranco-aceti/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lanfranco Aceti’s Bio</span></a></p>
<p><a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</span></a></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards #penetralia #sarahlucas #suppository #fakenews #porkchoponastick</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/v-gl0Ch92S8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/08/suppository/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=49992018-02-06T18:37:03Z2017-07-13T08:55:51Z<p>One of my new essays is out and is entitled <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/pub/wet-me1?context=cac" target="_blank"><em>Wet Me: Cupio Dissolvi ad Nubes et Lumina</em></a>, for the issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac titled <em><a href="https://www.pubpub.org/cac/page/cloud-and-molecular-aesthetics" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics</a> </em>published by MIT Press. I also edited the full volume with Paul Thomas and Edward Colless. Thanks, in particular go, to two new members of LEA Team of assistant editors: Candice Bancheri and Ashley Daugherty. It is an interesting set of contributions from authors around the world and follows the event that I organized in June 2014 in Istanbul as part of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference. <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/pub/wet-me1?context=cac" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The full article is available here</a>.</p>
<div class="p-block">Lanfranco Aceti</div>
<div class="p-block">Director of Arts Administration</div>
<div class="p-block">Boston University</div>
<div class="p-block"><a class="mention" href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/">http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com</a></div>
<div class="p-block"></div>
<div class="p-block"><strong>Reference this essay:</strong> Aceti, Lanfranco. “Wet Me: Cupio Dissolvi ad Nubes et Lumina.” In <em>Leonardo Electronic Almanac</em> 22, no. 1, edited by Lanfranco Aceti, Paul Thomas, and Edward Colless. Cambridge, MA: LEA / MIT Press, 2017.</div>
<div class="p-block"><strong>ISSN:</strong> 1071-4391</div>
<div class="p-block"><strong>ISBN:</strong> 978-1-906897-62-8</div>
<div class="p-block"><a class="mention" href="https://www.pubpub.org/pub/wet-me1?context=ca">https://www.pubpub.org/pub/wet-me1?context=ca</a></div>
<h4 id="abstract"><strong>Abstract</strong></h4>
<div class="p-block">The desire of being dissolved—or the desire of transcendence—is the focus of this essay which, by analyzing the concepts of both cloud and contemporary digital media, explores the dramatic tensions of the life and death in the digital archive. The essay questions the corporate and state enforced processes that shape and determine the condition of digital existence, as well as the participation of the individual in these mediated re-presentations of one’s life, which create a fracture between the <em>clouded-human</em> and the <em>grounded-human</em>.</div>
<div class="p-block"></div>
<div class="p-block">It is this new divide—added to social, economic, geographical and digital fractures—which points directly to contemporary cloud and molecular aesthetics as sources of tension, division, and opportunity. It is in the tension of <em>being and not being</em> produced by the cloud—and its processes of transubstantiation—that lays the possibility of overcoming divides that can no longer be resolved and reconciled. The cloud may offer the opportunity for a post-postmodern re-interpretation of existence that could afford humanity the dream to be and have it both ways by being and not being dissolved, by being disseminated present and archived past, by being dead and alive at the same time.</div>
<h4 id="keywords"><strong>Keywords</strong></h4>
<div class="p-block">Clouded-human, grounded-human, cloud, molecular, aesthetic, archive</div>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/_JRDAqcL-24" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/07/wet-me/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=59492017-07-18T13:33:34Z2017-07-12T13:37:28Z<p><a href="https://www.pubpub.org/cac/page/cloud-and-molecular-aesthetics" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics</em></a> is a volume that <a href="http://ocradst.wpengine.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">situates</a> a critical discourse on the molecular data–cloud and aesthetics within contemporary experiences of art and society. It reflects varied perceptions and current thinking by artists, curators, scientists, and theorists in comprehending the appropriation and colonization of the cloud. The cloud can be seen as a veiling of information, where it becomes clouded, foggy, fuzzy, obscure, or secretive as well as a (re)distribution of data when it condenses, blooms, and accretes into aesthetic, socio-political, technological, and scientific atmospheric contexts.</p>
<p>The book emerged from a conversation between <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lanfranco Aceti</a>, Director of Operational and Curatorial Research (OCR) and Editor in Chief of the <em>Leonardo Electronic Almanac</em> (MIT Press), and Paul Thomas, the director of the Transcultural Imaging Conference.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/05/affirmative-re-action/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics</em></a> is an open access book by Leonardo Electronic Almanac edited by Lanfranco Aceti, Paul Thomas, and Edward Colless. It is published by MIT Press with the support of Operational and Curatorial Research (OCR) and Goldsmiths, University of London.</p>
<div class="p-block"><strong>ISSN:</strong> 1071-4391</div>
<div class="p-block"><strong>ISBN:</strong> 978-1-906897-62-8</div>
<div class="p-block"></div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<div class="p-block">Volume contributors: <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/lanfranco_aceti" data-radium="true">Lanfranco Aceti</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/baga" data-radium="true">Birgitte Aga</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/edward-colless" data-radium="true">Edward Colless</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/chris-cottrell" data-radium="true">Chris Cottrell</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/david-eastwood" data-radium="true">David Eastwood</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/jane-grant" data-radium="true">Jane Grant</a> and <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/jens-hauser" data-radium="true">John Matthias</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/jacquelene-drinkall" data-radium="true">Jacquelene Drinkall</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/darren--tofts" data-radium="true">Darren Tofts</a> and <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/lisa-gye" data-radium="true">Lisa Gye</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/patricia-flanagan" data-radium="true">Patricia Flanagan</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/jeha" data-radium="true">Jens Hauser</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/michael-goddard" data-radium="true">Michael Goddard</a> and <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/gracekingston" data-radium="true">Grace Kingston</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/lkelley" data-radium="true">Lindsay Kelley</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/luke-hespanhol" data-radium="true">Luke Hespanhol</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/leon-marvell" data-radium="true">Leon Marvell</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/troy-innocent" data-radium="true">Troy Innocent</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/eugen--petcu" data-radium="true">Eugen Petcu</a> and <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/rodica-ileana-miroiu" data-radium="true">Rodica Ileana Miroiu</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/pia" data-radium="true">Pia Ednie-Brown</a> and <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/jondi-keane" data-radium="true">Jondi Keane</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/simone-mandl" data-radium="true">Simone Mandl</a> and <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/petra-gemeinboeck" data-radium="true">Petra Gemeinboeck</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/paul-thomas" data-radium="true">Paul Thomas</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/mikephillips" data-radium="true">Mike Phillips</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/mark-titmarsh" data-radium="true">Mark Titmarsh</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/tami-spector" data-radium="true">Tami Spector</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/darren--tofts" data-radium="true">Darren Tofts</a>, <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/chris-speed" data-radium="true">Chris Speed</a>, and <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/user/debraswackverizonnet" data-radium="true">Debra Swack</a>.</div>
<div class="p-block"></div>
<p>&nbsp;<br />
With thanks to the team of editorial assistants at Leonardo Electronic Almanac: Candice Bancheri, Ashley Daugherty, and Michael Spicher.<br />
&nbsp;</p>
<div class="p-block">Leonardo Electronic Almanac uses the new publishing platform <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/cac" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Contemporary Art and Cultures (CAC)</a>, a collaborative effort between OCR, Media LAB @ MIT, and MIT Press. Contemporary Art and Cultures (CAC) is a &#8220;publication for undisciplined artists, scholars, theoreticians, and critics with no boundaries.&#8221;</div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/Jlgep0PyI1Y" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/07/cloud-and-molecular-aesthetics/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/?p=59262018-02-06T18:37:04Z2017-06-10T14:32:12Z<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As part of its worldwide interventions and art engagements, <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/ad-nauseam/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the Museum of Contemporary Cuts presents </a></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ad nauseam</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> at documenta 14 by international artist and activist <a href="http://willemjansmit.nl" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Willem Jan Smit (NL, ES, DE)</a>. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ad nauseam</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is Willem Jan Smit’s redux from an exhibition of documentary sculpture in Athens titled </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">THEY WERE SHOWN THE DOOR IN A MATTER OF MINUTES,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> which was received with great critical acclaim and promptly acquired for a private collection.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath.…The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos.” <div class="fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box hundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling" style='background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);background-position: center center;background-repeat: no-repeat;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;'><div class="fusion-builder-row fusion-row "><div class="fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion_builder_column_1_1 fusion-one-full fusion-column-first fusion-column-last fusion-column-no-min-height 1_1" style='margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;'>
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[1] The posters—tiled, multiplied, and repetitive in themselves—create a refrain, a visual cue not dissimilar from the tune of a song which repeats itself over and over again. The posters exist both as a single images and as a collective group linked to larger and globalized socio-cultural networks. The photograph displays the collected garbage of a documenta 14 venue in Athens, which includes remnants of publicity and documentation of a quinquennial that attempted to create intercultural dialogue in name but in reality existed as a conflicted process of exploitation.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The Museum of Contemporary Cuts,” explained the curator, Lanfranco Aceti, “is working with Smit this year because of his original aesthetic approaches and worldviews, which move beyond national boundaries and ghettos of incommunicability by engaging and embracing the contemporary contradictions of local/global public spaces, communities, and networks that exist inside traditional and operational frameworks.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Smit has addressed the relationship between the space and the object in his aesthetic processes of production by providing a multitude of personal responses to authoritative power. With the public installation of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">ad nauseam,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the artist analyzes the difficulties of intercultural communication and questions the relationship between Kassel and Athens outside the frameworks of body politic and politicized optimism, to generate a statement that challenges the role of institutionally endorsed art and self-aggrandized branding strategies. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It is through these rebelling gestures that Smit argues in Deleuzian term the role of the watchers as those who safeguard, construct, and sell institutionally approved rebellion. “What they watch for are the movements, outbursts, infractions, disturbances, and rebellions occurring in the abyss.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">…</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> not a line of writing but a line of rigid segmentarity along which everyone will be judged and rectified according to his or her contours, individual or collective.” [2]</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The excision and rectification is embedded in the tiled posters which contour the documenta 14 experience of the artist in Athens in an outburst of rebellion against the aesthetic embellishment of art constantly sold as a motif for participation, interaction, and engagement. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aceti explains, “In his aesthetic practice Smit wanders between documentary sculpture and the less-traditional (and condemned) forms of aesthetic expression which exist at the borders of traditionally conceived art forms. It is this intersemiotic translatability of the aesthetic of the art object that makes Smit’s practice appealing.” </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In fact, the artist—although moving between genres and conventions—has developed his own articulated language to point to the servitude of contemporary art and to already enslaved and “blunted forms of rebellion.” As defined by Adorno, “conventions and genres did not just stand in the service of society; many, however, such as topos of the maid-turned-master, were already a blunted form of rebellion.” [3] </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It is in the complexity of the institutional engagements, rules, guidelines, and strict behavioral imposition that the artist is able to show his unsuffering of contemporary aesthetic and cultural exploitation. Willingly or unwillingly (but always mostly a-critically), the glittering circus of art participates in the processes of exploitation to reinforce and restate—</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">ad nauseam</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">— the currency of contemporary body politic. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987), 311.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">[2] Ibid., 200-201. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">[3] Theodor Adorno, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aesthetic Theory</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 203. </span></p>
<p><b>Artist Biography</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Artist’s Biography: Willem Jan Smit (NL, ES, DE) is a contemporary artist and activist who has exhibited internationally. He has shown in Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Greece, and the United States. His latest intervention was, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">ad nauseam</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, at documenta 14, shortly after a solo exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">They Were Shown the Door in a Matter of Minutes</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, in Athens as part of the Platforms Project. Currently he is engaging in a series of public interventions and has been invited to participate in numerous biennials between 2018 and 2019. He studied in Vancouver, Canada with Liz Magor, Geoffrey Farmer, and Garry Neill Kennedy. Smit is preparing a series of performative and process works, as well as participating in a range of international exhibitions with his sculptures and paintings. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.</span><div class="fusion-clearfix"></div>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/9Cis7UrWxX0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/06/ad-nauseam/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=59242018-02-06T18:37:04Z2017-06-01T08:49:12Z<p>What is a protest? And what does it mean to picket, to resist, to respond, and to give voice to one’s social and political concerns? In the wake of growing political uncertainty and the news of the United States withdrawal from the global Paris climate accords, a protest will occur from dawn to dawn, starting on June 3 at 5:12 am to June 4 at 5:12 am, on the White House sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. As political protests go, this may be the most unusual of them all. There are no shouted slogans, no placards, no bull-horns, or chanting. This political protest presents the bodies of people walking one step forward and two steps back in silence for a cycle of twenty-four hours. Speaking to the complexity of contemporary times, the bodies of the participants will carry messages through the visible and invisible signs of their existence and characteristics of their bodies.</p>
<p>In a moment in which protests are becoming a post-modern representation of the frivolity of entertainment and festive participation, what does one make of a person, of their history, and their repeated actions throughout a lifetime of labor? How does the contemporary self redefine physical embodiment of political activism?</p>
<p>Stefanos Tsivopoulos originally choreographed the well-known saying, “one step forward, two steps back,” which many Greeks used to say in order to sum up the current sociopolitical and economic condition in the country. The saying represents the belief that even though we move onward, we’re actually heading back because the steps forward are not enough to move us towards our goals or social-political progress. Tsivopoulos incorporated in the choreography gestures and movements from the ceremonial ritual that is performed by the Evzones, the National Guard situated in front of the Greek Parliament. The choreography was performed by two performers facing the Greek Parliament. Each step forward they took, was followed by two steps back, amounting to a backward movement that eventually located the performers away from the Parliament, and towards an existential place they couldn’t foresee.</p>
<p>Lanfranco Aceti together with Vera Ingrid Grant had initially proposed to the artist to replicate the performance in front of the United States’ White House, as a way of representing the weariness of the body engaged in the turmoil of contemporary post-democratic political processes; experiencing the “jagged grain” of lament and frustration, and yet vibrant with unruliness.</p>
<p>Stripped of any specific political message, the performers are dressed in black (as in the Athens performance). There will be 12 people, forming couples of two, who will alternate and walk on the sidewalk of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue from 5:12 am of June 3 to 5:12 am of June 4, 2017.</p>
<p>The sociopolitical implications—of what is a very simple action—will speak volumes towards the understanding of a society devoid of conflict and will invite people to consider and re-interrogate the roots of social and political processes, which appear to be historically cyclical and stagnant.</p>
<p>Tsivopolous explained that when he “spoke to Lanfranco, one of the two curators, I told him that my original idea was to have it in real time and for a longer period of time, and maybe in a reaction space. This political contested space becomes part of the work and people, the passers by, everybody can become part of the work at the same time. So that’s how the whole discussion started. I’m extremely happy that of all the places on earth, we are able to do it probably in one of the most contested places that is also very well-known—and given these times as well.”</p>
<p>“Tsivopoulos’s work poetically focuses on the contemporary political processes,” explained Aceti,“which are currently pushing people further and further away from current political parties, institutional representation, and collective participation understood in traditional terms. The political protest in front of the White House shows the distance and divide that is being created between post-citizens and contemporary politics. Because of the event’s location, this is not not just a political happening but a much more open ended engagement that straddles between politics and art. It asks even larger questions which are basic to our lives as human beings: what is it that we have been fighting for as a society, why have people died, what is it that people have died for, and—most important of them all—was it worth it? So what could be seen as aesthetic and political questions become incredibly large philosophical questions. What I find appealing in this protest/performance and its participants is the notion of inscribed identity of the body as it relates to its sociopolitical context.”</p>
<p>Professor Vera Grant added, “the visual language and interpretation that we use in the States is so different from the Athenian landscape. Occasionally they kind of cross territories and connect, but very often there is a disconnect. So I was very interested in the translatability of this performance piece here in the States and in this particular moment. I think it has wonderful opportunities written in. It seems this particular climate since the election, and all the dynamics around the election year, have unleashed so many thoughts, feelings, and moments of activism that have drawn artists in. Art is pushing its way to the center of that conversation in wonderful ways. The whole idea of how art is a part of these greater conversations—whether it has agency, whether it has the ability to activate change or not, and what the role of art is. These have always been questions, but in this moment there is just this energy! This is a space were ‘we’—and when I say ‘we’ I’m talking about a certain group of people and artists that <i>do</i> want to effect change in society—take action.”</p>
<p>This project—a pop-up event—is a collaboration between the <a href="http://www.museumofcontemporarycuts.org/">Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC)</a> and the <a href="http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/cooper-gallery">Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African &amp; African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University</a>.</p>
<p>Following the event in Washington there will be a series of talks and discussions at international Universities which will lead to a final publication with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press).</p>
<p><b>Artist Biography</b></p>
<p><b>Stefanos Tsivopoulo</b>s is a Greek artist and filmmaker living and working between Amsterdam, Athens, and New York. His works often results from long-term research into historical films and photographic archives and is driven by an interest in the social, political, and economic aspects that determine the world we live in. He has exhibited extensively in both art museums and film festivals around the world.</p>
<p>A selection of Tsivopoulos’s recent exhibitions include DOCUMENTA 14, Friedericianum, Kassel (2017); Kunsthaus Zurich (2016); MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Tate Modern, London (2014); MuCEM, Marseille (2014); 2nd Beijing Biennial, Beijing (2014); Haus Der Culturen Der Welt, Berlin (2013); SALT, Istanbul (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011); Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (2010); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2010); BFI Southbank, London (2009).</p>
<p>In 2013, he represented Greece in the 55th Venice Biennial with his video installation <em>History Zero</em>.</p>
<p><b>Curators’ Biographies</b></p>
<p><b>Lanfranco Aceti</b> works as an artist, curator, and academic. He is the director of <a href="https://www.bu.edu/artsadmin/">Arts Administration at Boston University</a>. He has done a range of exhibitions and public space interventions at renowned international venues including Tate Modern, MoMA, and the ICA London among others. He is Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/">MIT Press</a>, Leonardo journal), for which he has edited more than twelve volumes. He has lectured internationally at prestigious institutions such as Yale, Harvard, RCA, Goldsmiths, and Central Saint Martins. He worked as the director of <a href="http://kasagaleri.sabanciuniv.edu/">Kasa Gallery</a> in Istanbul, where he exhibited a range of innovative artworks including <i>75Watts</i> by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (acquired by MoMA) and Paolo Cirio’s <i>Loophole4All</i> (awarded the 2014 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica). Recently he performed and curated <i>Hope Coming On</i> at the <a href="http://www.mfa.org/">Museum of Fine Arts Boston</a>, as well as curated <i>The Small Infinite</i> at the <a href="http://www.hansardgallery.org.uk/">John Hansard Gallery</a> with artworks never previously exhibited from the estate of John Latham. Lanfranco Aceti has participated in numerous art fairs such as Art Athina, Art International, Supermarket, and Contemporary Istanbul, either as a curator or as an artist. In 2011, he curated the exhibition <i>Uncontainable</i> as part of the parallel events of the 12th <a href="http://bienal.iksv.org/en">Istanbul Biennial</a> and exhibited artworks on the media facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/portfolio-items/car-park/"><i>Car Park</i></a>, a public performance in the UK; <a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/portfolio-items/who-the-people/"><i>Who The People?</i></a> an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by <a href="http://library.chethams.com/">Chetham’s Library and Museum</a> in Manchester; and <i>Sowing and Reaping</i>, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus. As of 2017, Aceti has been asked to curate and prepare a series of exhibitions and projects including a large performance entitled <i>Accursed</i> for the <a href="http://thessalonikibiennale.gr/en/">Thessaloniki Biennial</a> in Greece.</p>
<p><b>Vera Ingrid Grant</b> is the director of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African &amp; African American Art at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. She most recently curated <i>THE WOVEN ARC</i> (Summer 2016); and the <i>Art of Jazz: NOTES</i> (Spring 2016) at the Cooper Gallery; and <i>The Persuasions of Montford </i>at the Boston Center for the Arts (Spring 2015). Her curatorial approach leverages theories of visual culture to create an immersive exhibition experience charged with object driven dialogues. Grant is a Fulbright Scholar (University of Hamburg), has an MA in Modern European History from Stanford University, and is currently a fellow (2015-16) at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL). Her recent publications include: <i>Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy</i>, as editor; and author of: “E2: Extraction/Exhibition Dynamics” (Harvard University Press, January 2015<i>)</i>; “Visual Culture and the Occupation of the Rhineland,” <i>The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 5, The Twentieth Century</i>, (Harvard University Press, February 2014); and “White Shame/Black Agency: Race as a Weapon in Post-World War I Diplomacy” in <i>African Americans in American Foreign Policy</i>, (University of Illinois Press, February 2014).</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/f8H6u0mIjtM" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/06/one-step-forward-two-steps-back/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=59112017-06-18T19:01:36Z2017-05-10T20:05:17Z<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As part of its ‘FEATURED’ artist series for the Platforms Project in Athens, the Museum of </span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Contemporary Cuts presents the international artist and activist, Willem Jan Smit. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The choice fell on Mr. Smit,” explained the curator Lanfranco Aceti and the artistic director Artemis Potamianou, “since his practice has been dealing for many years now with issues of rejection, remainder, and reminder.</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Through a contradictory embrace of contexts, traditional structures, and processes of aesthetic production, Smit has addressed the relationship between the space and the object.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">His approach is a reinterpretation of journalistic and/or archeological practices, which— as an “instant romanticism of the present” as Susan Sontag calls it—redefines cultural samples and their inherent historicity. When people come to places often they are said to ‘be part of the furniture,’ or for the furniture to be part of people’s histories. The work stands between the process of documented quotidian history, undocumented people’s presences, and documented object’s historicity. Subsequently, by focusing on the being in the picture and through the transposition of culture samples into the gallery space, Smit communicates the translational nature of the aesthetic process, itself.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Challenging aesthetic norms of what sculpture or painting or installation or plain photographic documentation is, Smit’s artistic practice presents a series of new works that are the result of the serendipitous nature of life interpreted as an </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">errare</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. An “</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">errare</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">,” in the definition given by the Harvard scholar Giuliana Bruno, is a process of s/he who straddles the worlds of aimlessly wandering and persistently blundering.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Smit’s process of aesthetic production becomes a work of art in itself—since his samples</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">are steeped in a walking through the city of Athens, for this particular show, in order to transport what has been abandoned a sense of belonging and affection for the unloved, the discarded, and the no longer useful. “It is in this very approach that Smit’s works are no longer objects but people—not simply in a metaphorical sense, but in the sense of recording traces that have been left by the human presence over the object” explained the curator. “By touching them, using them, and abusing them, people imprint themselves physically and psychologically on everyday objects, which acquire in their scuffs, marks, physical alterations, and manipulation a reflection, an aesthetic aura, or an almost invisible trace not just of their owners but also of their intrinsic existence as objects.”</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">THEY WERE SHOWN THE DOOR IN A MATTER OF MINUTES</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is a borrowed sample sentence from the New Oxford American Dictionary. Language lends the opportunity of looking at his works as if they were constantly playing and shifting roles, therefore being at times objects and at times their owners, both reflecting each other in a permanent game of mirrors. Ambiguity must be at the centre. The vicious constant exchange of roles and parts, at times comedic and at others dramatic, to be played within the larger stage of society and life leaves the viewer with a different understanding of the mediocrity of everyday objects, actions, and people. By looking at the hyperreal of mediocrity—as the artist defines contemporary lives in Baudrillardian terms—he unveils the superficiality and hypocrisy of contemporary living, shifting words like vacuous, mediocre, and banal from the discarded objects to the so called ‘empowered’ lives of their owners and viewers. </span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><b>Artist Biography</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Artist’s Biography: Willem Jan Smit (NL, ES, DE) is a contemporary artist and activist who has exhibited internationally. He has shown in Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Greece, and the United States. His latest intervention was, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">ad nauseam</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, at documenta 14, shortly after a solo exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">They Were Shown the Door in a Matter of Minutes</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, in Athens as part of the Platforms Project. Currently he is engaging in a series of public interventions and has been invited to participate in numerous biennials between 2018 and 2019. He studied in Vancouver, Canada with Liz Magor, Geoffrey Farmer, and Garry Neill Kennedy. Smit is preparing a series of performative and process works, as well as participating in a range of international exhibitions with his sculptures and paintings. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.</span></p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/WsK_KIDyEIE" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/05/they-were-shown-the-door-in-a-matter-of-minutes/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=59082018-02-06T18:37:05Z2017-05-10T19:59:50Z<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For the Platforms Project in Athens, the Museum of Contemporary Cuts presents an international exhibition consisting of two works by two different artists strategically placed in opposition to one another. The two artists, Lanfranco Aceti and Yiannis Melanitis, challenge each other through a series of colloquia that, while rooted in incommunicability, isolation, and censorship, nevertheless speaks of contemporary notions of freedom, democracy, and understanding. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Both Aceti and Melanitis base their practice on highly conceptualized and semiotic interpretations of reality. Steeped in a social understanding of art as action going beyond aesthetic etiquette, this conceptualization related to their respective practices is conceived as an intentional betrayal of typical ideologies, conventions, and good manners. “There should be nothing civilized about art,” said Aceti while talking about his work </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Last Drop</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> with Melanitis (his artistic counterpart) and the Platforms Project’s artistic director, Artemis Potamianou.“Art that is not uncouth, vulgar, and in your face is just another pandering to the aesthetic of the body politic and to corporate narcissistic and golden egotistic self-representations. This sycophantic art can only be perceived as an obsequious </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">hierarchical anallingus</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to moralistic self-righteous ideologues and to those who safeguard and defend aesthetic canons worldwide.” Beyond contemporary simplistic Gramscian re-interpretations of duty and of social participation, Aceti’s explanation expands upon his Adornoian philosophical approach as a means of navigating and actively acknowledging a contemporary context defined by post-capitalistic frameworks which have made it all but impossible to participate without being exploited. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Melanitis spoke of “the importance of re-modeling political discourse in the realm of a modernism that never came of age—an unfinished process. In this approach the artist—beside from contextualizing a practice to be followed—has to define the ‘exact armory’s paraphernalia.’” His scatology-escatology series formalize a careful analysis of an artistic practice where the artist designs through philosophy (correlating his practice to the Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketch of a valve flush toilet or Marcel Duchamp&#8217;s formula arrhe/ merdre=art merde). Similar to Alfred Le Petit’s and Jules Eugène Lenepveu’s caricatures of Émile Zola where the writer defecates while writing texts, the point where scatology becomes political is signified through the creation of a parallel relationship made between political stances and the artist&#8217;s practice. Seemingly a traditional portrait, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Portrait Study of the Chromatic Oscillation Βetween Barium Yellow and Ultramarine Blue</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Melanitis’s oil painting is a chromatic palette challenge executed in the atelier, which oscillates between two chromatic limits through a row of colors while having to keep the image ‘intact.’</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Extracting from their own very personal experiences of the contemporary globalized reality of failure and its constant mythologization of the political collapse at national and supranational levels, the two artists simultaneously challenge and corroborate</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">one another. This back and forth between the artists is precipitated and ignited by the mutual desire to create an unorthodox archive of the institutional fake facts and aesthetic propaganda that is—with the aid of the ricin oil so willingly provided by conniving aesthetic institutions—shoved down the throats of viewers. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aceti and Melanitis transpose the Baudrillardian concept of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">conspiracy of art</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> from a philosophical and theoretical understanding of life to a Pasolinian reforging of reality which, deprived of myths, is situated in front of the viewer butt naked—for all to see. It is the viewer, in the understanding of the artist(s), who can no longer be communicated with whenever s/he is outside the civilized political-social-financial frameworks. This is a viewer, particularly within international contexts, who is constantly described as poorly educated, ignorant, and backwards simply because s/he no longer fits within the positively enforced representation of collapsing states and cannibalizing financial institutions. Dejected and rejected, this viewer stands outside the divide that exists between apparata of representation and the represented. This particular viewer, abandoned and no longer recognized as ‘other’ but as the discarded remnant of contemporary necropolitics, is condemned to a status of ignorant sub-human proletariat, unidentifiable because no longer financially (or otherwise) part of twenty-first century societies. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aceti’s work is, therefore, based on the exploration and the analysis of the archive through an exploration of the image, which is recontextualized in the structure of contemporary exploitative social frameworks. This is an aesthetic action that speaks of processes of prostitution, abuse, and fake socio-political dreams. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Melanitis’s work is a </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">meticulous study of philosophy at its limits, stopping at a point where it may be dispersed into art. In this technique, ideas predate any artistic methodology that often makes the execution of the artwork strenuous. His conceptualism refers to ‘information’ instead of ‘ideas,’ deriving from a framework delineated as neo-modernistic.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Both artists refer to their work in relation to the possibility and impossibility of sharing experiences, and to the communicability and incommunicability of contexts and emotions located outside shared entanglements. Their works and actions ask of the viewer to feel and engage the world of hardship outside the golden walls of personal financial and political clout; in order to see where that money is coming from and access an anger which is rooted in a twenty-first century aesthetic that refuses to gild the lilies. </span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><b>Artists Biographies</b></p>
<p><b>Lanfranco Aceti</b> <span style="font-weight: 400;">works as an artist, curator, and academic. He is the director of </span><a href="https://www.bu.edu/artsadmin/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Arts Administration at Boston University</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">He has done a range of exhibitions and public space interventions at renowned international venues including Tate Modern, MoMA, and the ICA, London among others. He is Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MIT Press</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Leonardo journal), for which he has edited more than twelve volumes. He worked as the director of</span> <a href="http://kasagaleri.sabanciuniv.edu/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kasa Gallery</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">in Istanbul, where he exhibited a range of innovative artworks including </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">75Watts</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, acquired by MoMA and Paolo Cirio’s </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Loophole4All</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, awarded the 2014 Golden Nica, Prix Ars Electronica. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recently he performed </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hope Coming On</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> at the</span> <a href="http://www.mfa.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Museum of Fine Arts Boston</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">He has exhibited numerous personal projects including </span><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/portfolio-items/car-park/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Car Park</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, a public performance in the UK; </span><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/portfolio-items/who-the-people/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Who The People?</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by</span> <a href="http://library.chethams.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chetham&#8217;s Library and Museum</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">in Manchester; </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Annunciation</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a performance; and</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Sowing and Reaping</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus. As of 2017, Aceti has been asked to curate and prepare a series of exhibitions and projects including a large performance entitled </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Accursed</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for the</span> <a href="http://thessalonikibiennale.gr/en/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thessaloniki Biennial</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Greece.</span></p>
<p><b>Melanitis</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">’s work initiates from an intense conceptualization on the strategies of contemporary art. His recent research focuses on the role of information on the arts considering “INFORMATION AS THE NEW CONCEPTUALIZATION.” </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">His work employs heterogeneous artistic media: installations, performances, bioart, theoretical texts, poems, code-based web artworks, sculptures, oil paintings, and drawings. He derives aesthetic and conceptual inspiration from philosophy and epistemology to incorporate concepts from quantum physics, biotechnology, mathematics, and political theory in his works. In 2017, he produced the first transgenic art-insect, a living butterfly breed containing his genetic material.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yiannis Melanitis holds degrees in painting, sculpture, and digital arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts and is presently a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture, (NTUA) with a thesis entitled: Biological Dynamics in Art. He has exhibited in Mexico, Brasil, Belgium, UK, Portugal, and Switzerland. Recent solo exhibitions were at the National Museum, Brasil; Biblioteque of Brasil; Museu D. Diogo de Sousa, Braga, Portugal; and Gallo Romeins Museum and Praetorium Tongeren, Belgium.</span></p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/TizLllz-cFA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/05/please-pardon-my-french/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=59142017-05-11T18:00:44Z2017-05-09T20:16:31Z<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Affirmative Re-Action</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, curated by Lanfranco Aceti and Candice Bancheri for the <a href="http://www.museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a>, is the latest art project by American conceptual artist, Jay Critchley. Rooted in the long tradition of twentieth-century art, the artwork is a recycling and re-hanging of Provincetown’s historical street banners. These large plasticized banners announcing cultural events and/or displaying advertisements are a staple of contemporary society and towns the world over. Critchley gives them new life by covering them with paint and naturally colored sand. The new writings and the old announcements blend, creating an unusual object in which the understanding of the original event is subsequently distorted and has to be retraced. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Critchley&#8217;s works of art start from one very simple question and assumption. The artist asks, “</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">ever wonder what happens to all that plas</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">tic that hangs over us on Commercial Street every summer—after the roses have faded and the event is over?” The honest reply should be: of course not! The majority of people no longer observe the quotidian mediocrity of the objects that surround them; an old banner is just that—an old banner. The reality of consumption is based on the negligent consideration for the costs of existence, via consumerism as a form of having in order to exist. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The artist’s aesthetic and works of art point to the opposite. His social interventions, activism, and conceptualizations are there to challenge the oblivious and act as a post-postmodern disruption of propaganda messaging and contemporary frivolity. His work is steeped in historical, cultural, and visual references obliging the viewer to retrace—in a contemporary archeological fashion—the aesthetic, meaning, and history of the object. The banners replicate the structure of something that is already there; thus anticipating a transformation that is a regression. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It is with this rediscovery process in mind—reconnecting historical events to their present histories concurrently being historicized and/or discarded—that the artist launches his first of a series of banners. Critchley’s choice in subject matter fell on Russia and the ‘new Cold War,’ in order to analyze the complexity of its historical relationship with the United States. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Affirmative Re-Action</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> unearths notions of domestic unease related to the potential of utopian and dystopian realities birthed by failing ideologies. One hundred years after the beginning of the Russian revolution in 1917, the strained relationship between the two ‘superpowers’—to use Cold War terminology—is now revealing the inadequacy of paradigms and dichotomies unable to respond to current challenges and crises. Nevertheless, Russia and the United States—as if trapped in a tried and true comedy of errors and horrors—continue to insist on forcing a straightjacket over the multifaceted condition that is the current post-postmodern socio-political disarray. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The concept for this first two-sided banner—8’ X 30”—is rooted in both the centennial of Provincetown’s historic, fecund decade: 1910-1920, and the new Cold War. Side one reads in large Russian constructivist numbers, “</span><b>1917</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><b>”</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the year of the Russian Revolution and WWI; side two, reads the word, “</span><b>DEAL</b><span style="font-weight: 400;">.” Provocation, sarcasm, historical wit, and a conceptual approach to these works of art are mixed with a aesthetic modernist flair, which brings to mind the likes of Kazimir Malevich, Sergei Eisenstein, and George Orwell. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">By recycling and recreating these discarded signs and re-hanging them over Commercial Street in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Critchley’s venture, the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Affirmative Re-Action Project</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, disrupts the quotidian—providing a glimpse of ‘reality’ within a world of fakes and fakers. The first banner, redesigned and re-fashioned with paint and naturally colored sand, will be installed from May 10th to May 31st near the Provincetown Town Hall. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you wish to contribute to the artwork, the artist will be accepting donations of old street banners from businesses for his </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Affirmative Re-Action</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Project. You can contact him through his website: </span><a href="http://www.jaycritchley.com/contact.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">http://www.jaycritchley.com/contact.html </span></a></p>
<p>You can also check out this video interview with <a href="https://vimeo.com/174668310" target="_blank">Jay Critchley for the Black Sheep Talks of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a>. </p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><b>Artist Biography</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jay Critchley’s visual, conceptual, and performance work in conjunction with his environmental activism have traversed the globe, showing and/or performing in Argentina, Japan, England, Holland, Germany, Columbia and the United States. He was featured in the LOGO channel’s “Ptown Diaries”, and interviewed by BBC/UK. His solo exhibition at </span><a href="http://www.jaycritchley.com/deep-bones.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Freight + Volume Gallery</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Chelsea, New York City received exciting reviews from the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Village Voice.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A longtime Provincetown, Cape Cod, MA resident, he utilizes the town, landscape, harbor, beaches, and dunes as his medium. He founded the patriotic </span><a href="http://www.jaycritchley.com/old-glory-condoms.html"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Old Glory Condom Corporation</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which won a controversial three-year legal battle for its US Trademark. He produced, wrote, and directed several movies and documentaries, including: </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Toilet Treatments</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> which received the HBO Audience Award at the Provincetown International Film Festival; </span><a href="http://www.jaycritchley.com/beige-motel.html"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Beige Motel</span></i> </a><span style="font-weight: 400;">project which involved encrusting a 1955 iconic, roadside motel in sand— appearing as “an A-frame with wings” before it was demolished.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jay’s social art practice includes running the </span><a href="http://thecompact.org/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Provincetown Community Compact</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which works with artists and the environment, and sponsors the annual Provincetown Harbor</span><a href="http://swim4life.org/"> <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Swim for Life &amp; Paddler Flotilla</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, a fundraiser for AIDS and women’s health, founded in 1988.</span></p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/4O8KKfpQZFM" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/05/affirmative-re-action/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=58382018-02-06T18:37:05Z2017-04-27T06:35:52Z<p><em>100 Days Urn</em> is the newest artwork to be placed on <a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2017/01/the-fifth-column/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>The Fifth Column</em></a> of the White House. &#8220;The urn has been produced by the internationally renowned British artist Grayson Perry. It will collect metaphorically, and perhaps one day even physically, the ashes of the first one hundred days of the Trump presidency. It will act as a repository of all that is incredibly wrong in contemporary society,&#8221; Lanfranco Aceti explained. Named <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/who-is-cotus/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Curator Of The United States (COTUS)</a> by the <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a>, Aceti announced this new curated installation forty-nine days after his first installation at the White House. Entitled <a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2017/03/the-finger-to-the-us/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em>The Finger to the US</em></a>, this first installation exhibited <em>L.O.V.E.</em> an artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, an Italian enfant terrible of the international art scene.</p>
<p>“This new installation reflects on the frivolity of present times and on the hyper-mediated sensationalism of fake news, which twists words irrespective of their contexts and intentions in order to enforce corporate hierarchies of power.” Aceti asserts, “let’s make it clear—this is not a right wing, not a leftist, and not a centrist political installation. The choice fell on Grayson Perry because of his ability to command the viewer to look at an empty container and reflect upon the reality of the words that adorn it, filling it up with one’s own knowledge, meaning, and experiences.”</p>
<p>Adorned with words and phrases like: “The Frivolous Now,” “cyber-bullying,” “VIP,” “cute YouTube clips,” “soft power,” “botox,” “mental illness,” “FaceBook,” “Body Armour,” “Leisure Industry,” “CCTV,” “allergies,” “Product Launch,” “Battling Lancer,” “Porn,” “CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER,” “privileged elite,” “online casino,” “anti-social behaviour,” “respect,” “Twitter,” etc., the vase symbolizes all the contained madness of a society which President Trump wants to make great again. <em>The Frivolous Now</em>, Grayson Perry’s glazed ceramic vase, was exhibited in 2011 as part of the show The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum. The urn is similar in many ways to the frivolous image of President Trump and the politics of global entertainment produced by the US and endorsed by a public that pours its own inadequacies, frivolity, superficiality, and ideological fascisms into the metaphorical container of the president and the presidency.</p>
<p>“As #COTUS,” Aceti explained, “I have enjoyed developing this exciting project and bringing it to the attention of people who otherwise would not necessarily engage in social conversation that goes beyond divisive politics. If I had to choose what to place in the <em>100 Days Urn</em>, I would place in it the ashes of fascism—containing the cremated remains and crisped falsehoods bequeathed both by the crazed, unreasonable right and the rabid, moralistic left. I would also like to add to the urn the burnt remains of the frivolity of contemporary protests, which have substituted the wearing down of a committed body via the daily grind for substantial and sustainable change with political protests as social media entertaining contexts of self-promotion. I would really L.O.V.E. to place in that urn the ashes of this vacuous present and pee on it.”</p>
<p><em>100 Days Urn</em> will stand on <em>The Fifth Column</em> for the next forty-nine days, after which it will be substituted by a new artwork selected by Lanfranco Aceti, Curator Of The United States or #COTUS.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/12-grayson-perry/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Grayson Perry’s Bio</a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/lanfranco-aceti/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lanfranco Aceti’s Bio</a></p>
<p><a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a></p>
<p>#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards #100days #100daysurn</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/j4If4Cr-FPU" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/04/100-days-urn/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=57902018-02-06T18:37:06Z2017-03-09T08:02:12Z<p>Italy gives the middle finger to the US. A recent addition to the White House lawn in the form of a sculpture presented to the US by Italy is causing quite a stir. &#8220;This is a gift made to the American people,&#8221; said the mayor of Milan. “We are depriving one of our most beautiful squares of a memorable piece of art,” he explained “and offering the finger as a gesture of friendship, change, and understanding. It is a gesture of L.O.V.E.”</p>
<p>The finger in question is a sculptural work of art by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan entitled L.O.V.E., an acronym that stands for libertà, odio, vendetta, eternità (freedom, hate, revenge, eternity). Unveiled in Piazza Affari in Milan on September 27, 2010 in front of the Milan Stock Exchange, the Carrara marble sculpture with a middle finger stuck in the air and the other digits cut off has been fascinating Italian and international audiences ever since.</p>
<p>“It is an honor for us,” said the former Milan’s Cultural Affairs Counselor. “To be gifting this much-loved sculpture by one of our most esteemed and critically acclaimed contemporary artists to the White House is an act of friendship. We couldn’t refuse when the curator Lanfranco Aceti asked for it as part of his curatorial project at the White House entitled <em><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2017/01/the-fifth-column/" target="_blank">The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards</a></em>.”</p>
<p>Aceti, a born Italian, was appointed as the White House Contemporary Art Curator or #COTUS (Curator of the United States), and brokered the negotiations between the Italian and US governments, as well as the respective homes of the sculpture, Milan and the White House.</p>
<p>“I am aware that this sculpture is somewhat out of the ordinary for American audiences used to less controversial public artworks,” said the curator “but these are times that require bold statements and since this work of art was part of Cattelan’s retrospective, <em>Against Ideologies</em>, it is my belief that it is relevant to the current socio-political climate and the controversial stances of the Trump Administration.”</p>
<p>Aceti explained that <em>The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards</em> is a curatorial and artistic project that will place a new artwork on the North Lawn of the White House every forty-nine days which will feature a total of forty-nine separate but related pieces of art. This curatorial and artistic operation is inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s <em>The Fifth Column and the and the First Forty-Nine Stories</em>.</p>
<p>“It will be interesting to try to decipher who is giving the middle finger to whom because of the complexity of the current socio-economic and political context of the United States and the world. In fact, at the White House,” COTUS said “the finger, similar to its positioning in Milan, is not facing the institution that it appears to criticize. The finger seems to be directed from the White House to the viewing public, the press, and other institutions in Washington DC and around the world. Is the finger a sign of the renewed autonomy and boldness of Trump’s presidency? Is it a form of criticism of the various forces conspiring against American society’s desire to return to its greatness? Or is ‘COTUS’ actually offering the finger as a sign of protest to both the government and the public for their lack of support for the arts, symbolizing his opposition to the current funding cuts?”</p>
<p>Supported by the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, which created the COTUS position and appointed Lanfranco Aceti as curator, <em>The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards</em> will attempt to provide insight into the complexities of existential post-truths, ethical conflicts, truthful hyperboles, parallel realities, fake news, and alternative facts.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/maurizio-cattelan" target="_blank">Maurizio Cattelan&#8217;s Bio</a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/lanfranco-aceti/" target="_blank">Lanfranco Aceti&#8217;s Bio</a></p>
<p><a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a></p>
<p>#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/8M4Jl5ijdhI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/03/the-finger-to-the-us/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=58162018-02-06T18:37:06Z2017-03-08T17:40:07Z<p><a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank">The Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a> has nominated for the position of <b>Curator Of The United States</b> (COTUS) <a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/lanfranco-aceti/">Lanfranco Aceti</a>.</p>
<p>Dr. Aceti was chosen for his unconventional curatorial projects and approaches. He has defied the mainstream conventions in curating contemporary art and experimented with alternative approaches which oblige, both the viewers and professionals, to question the role of contemporary art in the current socio-political and financial scenarios.</p>
<p>The curatorial project that Dr. Aceti has launched as COTUS, <i><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2017/01/the-fifth-column/" target="_blank">The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards</a></i>, playfully engages with fake news and propaganda, while at the same time blurring the lines between the traditional role of the curator and that of the artist. “What is truth anyway?” says Dr. Aceti. “Truth is the belief of a group which tries to impose it upon anyone else. The impossibility of controlling the multiplicitous and nefarious voices of propaganda sold for centuries as news and truth is the new exciting reality, which is collapsing in the twenty-first century. <i><a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/the-finger-to-the-us/" target="_blank">The Finger to the US</a></i>, with which we opened our collection and activity, is just this, another piece of news, that is somewhat fake but nonetheless—at the same time, as absurd as this may sound—true.”</p>
<p>Dr. Lanfranco Aceti works as a curator, artist, and academic. He has done a range of exhibitions and public space interventions that include the Tate Modern, MoMA, the ICA London and other renown international venues. He is the Director of Arts Administration at Boston University, Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (The MIT Press, Leonardo journal), for which he has edited 12 volumes. He has lectured internationally at prestigious institutions such as Yale, Harvard, RCA, Goldsmiths, and Central Saint Martins. He worked as director of Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, where he exhibited a range of innovative artworks including <i>75Watts </i>by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, acquired by MoMA or Paolo Cirio’s <i>Loophole4All</i>, awarded the 2014 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. Recently he curated <i>The Small Infinite </i>at the John Hansard Gallery with artworks never previously exhibited from the estate of John Latham. Lanfranco Aceti has participated in numerous art fairs such as ArtAthina, ArtInternational, and Contemporary Istanbul, either as a curator or as an artist. In 2011 he curated the exhibition <i>Uncontainable</i> for ISEA2011 Istanbul and part of the parallel events of the 12th Istanbul Biennial and exhibited artworks on the media facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including <i>Car Park, </i>a public performance in the UK, <i>The Lady and the Revolutionary Parrot</i> in Athens, <i>The Annunciation</i>, a public performance in Cyprus for NeME, and <i>Who The People? </i>an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester. His works of art are in international museums and private collections.</p>
<p>#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/IsCdYuuIHIQ" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/03/who-is-cotus/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=57142018-02-06T18:37:07Z2017-01-30T15:35:08Z<p><em>The Slap</em> aka <em>He Who Gets Slapped</em> is a performance and a series of digital artworks presented for the first time in 2015 at the <a href="http://www.supermarketartfair.com" target="_blank">Supermarket Art Fair</a> in Stockholm, Sweden. The online element of this artwork presented on eBay is part of the <a href="http://exstrange.com" target="_blank">extrange exhibition</a>. The performance is part of a larger collection of artworks titled <a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/portfolio-items/soma/" target="_blank"><em>Soma</em></a> which is inspired by the contemporary social tensions and labor crises that have characterized authoritarian regimes and post-democracies across the world. </p>
<p><em>The Slap</em> was conceived by the artist, Lanfranco Aceti, as a moment of action, response and reflection and provided the public with the ‘opportunity’ to physically slap, for a fee of $500, &#8216;a worker, a protester, a Muslim and a migrant,’ who will be standing on a Nineteenth century ‘preaching’ box (also known as soap box).</p>
<p>The artwork was also posted online via eBay where people could purchase a slap for $500. They could witness the slap via FaceTime and/or Skype. </p>
<p>The artwork, inspired by globally internationalized conflicts, reflects not solely on the violence and isolationism of contemporary nationalisms but also on the misgivings of a globalization process in name of economics mainly, which has completely discarded socio-political and cultural-ethical issues.</p>
<p>In 2015 it was possible to buy a slap on eBay and bid for it. This performance &#8211; sold online in the form of a receipt &#8211; has been re-presented in 2017. It is possible, once again, to order a slap and punish a person that embodies and is the cause of all that is supposed to be wrong with our contemporary societies: &#8216;a student, a worker, a protester, a Muslim and a migrant.’ To access the eBay page <a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/-/152416503119?" target="_blank">please click here</a>. </p>
<p>&#8220;For years I have been working on the absurdity of contemporary societies, their ideological contradictions and the perversity of our political systems which, in the name of money, have abandoned any ethical underpinnings and are indistinguishable from criminal organizations.&#8221; Lanfranco Aceti explains his artworks as hellish visions derived from a Kafkian and Orwellian understanding of societies, institutions and religions. &#8220;Now reality is surpassing the absurdity of my own work, in many ways making it look almost like a mild documentation of contemporary societies.&#8221;</p>
<p><em>The Slap</em> aka <em>He Who Gets Slapped</em>: video triptych. </p>
<p>The Slap &#8211; 3 of 3<br />
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/194379258" width="850" height="478" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/194379258">The Slap &#8211; 3 of 3</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/lanfrancoaceti">Lanfranco Aceti</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>The Slap &#8211; 2 of 3<br />
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/194379111" width="850" height="478" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/194379111">The Slap &#8211; 2 of 3</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/lanfrancoaceti">Lanfranco Aceti</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>The Slap &#8211; 1 of 3<br />
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/194374697" width="850" height="478" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/194374697">The Slap &#8211; 1 of 3</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/lanfrancoaceti">Lanfranco Aceti</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/whUIpXxVYLY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/01/the-slap/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=57272017-10-03T20:58:40Z2017-01-20T00:01:11Z<p>On January 20, 2017, @ 00:01 <em>The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards</em> by Lanfranco Aceti was quietly launched in the maelstrom of contemporary tensions. This project is inspired by the complexity of contemporary society, its upheavals, crises, and turmoils. It is a project in which the role of the artist and that of the curator meld, generating confusing existential post-truths, ethical conflicts, truthful hyperboles, parallel realities, fake news, and alternative facts.</p>
<p>The project consists of Forty-Nine Cards that recount brief stories of contemporary times, using alternative narratives. <em>The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards</em> is not inspired by a revelation of the truth, but instead by the infinite opportunities that emerge from presenting possibilities, opinions, desires, aspirations, and dreams as <em>facts</em>. There is of course in both philosophical and aesthetic terms the fact that the materialization of an idea is indeed a fact, even if it is not necessarily the materialization of the object itself which is realized physically.</p>
<p>Lanfranco Aceti has worked for years on issues of reality and virtuality and their conflicting existential relationship. Issues of what is real, what is true, definition of virtuality have inspired his work, together with larger socio-political issues related to the struggle of people in eking out a living in the contemporary globalized post-capitalistic frameworks. As an artist, Aceti has done multiple interventions in public and virtual spaces over the years, both as an artist and as curator.</p>
<p><em>The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards</em> is another such project in which the concept of the Fifth Column confuses the reality of &#8216;what is what&#8217; to such an extent that the doubt may arise that this very project is actually functional to an Orwellian deconstruction of democracy.</p>
<p>Lanfranco Aceti will curate forty-nine artworks which will be placed on the Fifth Column of the White House. The artworks will be accompanied by a card that illustrates the project. For this project Aceti was named <a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2017/03/who-is-cotus/">Curator Of The United States or COTUS</a> by the <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Museum of Contemporary Cuts</a>, blending the role of the artist and that of the curator.</p>
<p>These narratives and works of art will provide the opportunity to revisit contemporary art in a context not hindered by possibilities or impossibilities: but actually realized without any physical, organizational, and socio-political restrictions. The artist will work within the tradition of collage and contemporary digital borrowings, creating a landscape of parallel realities.</p>
<p>These parallel realities and narratives will be used to generate a catalog published by the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, MIT Press.</p>
<p>Below is a list of the artworks installations on the Fifth Column at the White House&#8217;s North Lawn.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/09/war-pigs/">September 21, 2017 &#8211; Card Number 6</a> aka War Pigs</p>
<p><a href="http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/08/suppository/">August 4, 2017 &#8211; Card Number 5</a> aka Suppository</p>
<p>June 15, 2017 &#8211; Card Number 4</p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2017/04/100-days-urn/">April 27, 2017 &#8211; Card Number 3</a> aka 100 Days Urn</p>
<p>March 9, 2017 &#8211; Card Number 2</p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2017/03/the-finger-to-the-us/">January 20, 2017, Card Number 1</a> aka Finger to the US</p>
<p>#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards</p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/lanfranco-aceti/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lanfranco Aceti’s Bio</a></p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/SwRVmSSPg9U" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2017/01/the-fifth-column/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=56922018-02-06T18:37:08Z2016-12-09T19:53:21Z<p>A new exhibition titled Back to Basics: Uncanny in which I have a set of artworks and an installation. This group show curated by Artemis Potamianou sees the participation of Lanfranco Aceti, Misha Cattaui, Kalos &#038; Klio, Simon MacEwan, Elisabeth Penker, Aggelos Antonopoulos, Augustus Veinoglou, Vasilis Zographos and Ioannis Savvidis. The exhibition, the first of a two parts show, at the Enia Gallery, from December 9, 2016, to March 4, 2017, presents a series of artworks based on artistic practices that are exploring the uncanny aesthetic basics of contemporary art and activism. Admission to the exhibition is free.Official opening: Friday, 9 December 2016 at 20:00. Exhibition duration: 9 December 2016 to 4 March 2017. Enia Gallery opening hours: Wednesday – Thursday 11:00 – 19:00 Friday 11:00 – 20:00 Saturday 11:00 – 16:00. </p>
<p>The official curatorial statement for <em>Back to Basics: Uncanny</em> by Artemis Potamianou and released by Enia Gallery follows. </p>
<p>The uncanny is a complex concept that Sigmund Freud analyses in Art and literature, first published in the autumn of 1919, and it has been a source of inspiration and debate for art and philosophy ever since. The exhibition <em>Back to Basics: Uncanny</em> explores various approaches to the concept as defined in Freud’s essay and how the meaning of the word Uncanny is reflected within artists&#8217; creative processes.</p>
<p>The Uncanny conveys the notion of the alien, the strange and the uncertain, but its uniqueness lies in its direct connection to the feeling of an experience at once familiar and well-hidden. According to Freud, something completely unknown cannot be uncanny; it must have references to something older which has been alienated.</p>
<p>In the chapter “Das unheimliche” (The Uncanny), Freud examines the relation of the German word heimlich (familiar, not paradoxical) and its logical opposite, unheimlich. Freud, by looking up the etymology of the two words in the dictionaries of various languages and collecting stories, experiences and situations that trigger a sense of unfamiliarity, concludes that the uncanny belongs in the category of the scary-weird which has been repressed to the point of becoming unfamiliar.</p>
<p>The semiological interpretation of ‘heimlich’ goes in the direction of ambivalence, until it coincides with its opposite — Unheimlich: “the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, home-like, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ is the token of repression”. <div class="fusion-fullwidth fullwidth-box hundred-percent-fullwidth non-hundred-percent-height-scrolling" style='background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);background-position: center center;background-repeat: no-repeat;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;'><div class="fusion-builder-row fusion-row "><div class="fusion-layout-column fusion_builder_column fusion_builder_column_1_1 fusion-one-full fusion-column-first fusion-column-last fusion-column-no-min-height 1_1" style='margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;'>
<div class="fusion-column-wrapper" style="background-position:left top;background-repeat:no-repeat;-webkit-background-size:cover;-moz-background-size:cover;-o-background-size:cover;background-size:cover;" data-bg-url="">
[1] This transition from familiarity to alienation and a sense of danger is fundamental in the constitution of an uncanny situation. </p>
<p>Artists have often tried to convey this special feeling of the Uncanny in various ways by joining parts-elements of a text or image in unexpected ways. In the exhibition <em>Back to Basics: Uncanny</em> viewers will be able to discover ways of presenting and interpreting the Uncanny through the work of nine artists.</p>
<p>Lanfranco Aceti’s <em>Who the People?</em> was first presented at Chetham’s Library, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel worked together on the Communist Manifesto. The work examines the notions of individual identity, personal data and post-capitalism. The exhibition features four digital portraits where the faces are covered by parts of ‘deleted’ data, producing a narrative about the process of deleting humanity. The viewer is unable to tell the faces and the stories of the depicted persons, the connections among them or the information on display, and the result is a strange, awkward, uncanny sensation.</p>
<p>A different approach to portraits with missing parts we find in the works of Vassilis Zografos from the <em>Missing</em> series, which focus on variations of traditional Greek dress and grooming. To Zografos, these are painterly renderings of the elements of Greek folk tradition — the collaborative spirit, the coming-together on festive occasions in a mood of participation and congeniality. The faceless portraits appear as strange symbolic depictions of women where, as in Aceti, the viewer is called upon to discover and fill in their narrative. </p>
<p>Micha Cattaui’s <em>Tour de force</em> attempts to reinterpret the famous statue of the Nike of Samothrace, with an entirely new and unfamiliar approach to this quintessential symbol of ancient Greek art and prized exhibit of the Louvre. The bright pink colour and the atrophied chicken wings in place of the statue’s characteristic appendages give a sense of ‘mutilation’ as part of the artist’s caustic comment on the colonialist transfer of one civilisation’s cultural heritage to another, more ‘powerful’ country. </p>
<p><em>Split Representation</em> is a series of portraits by Elisabeth Penker, inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss’ text on Split Representation in the Art of Asia and the America. In this text Levi-Strauss compares cultures from different times that use identical elements in their representation of bodies and faces. Notably, a face is never depicted frontally but as two mirrored profiles joined in the middle to form a strange multi-sided view. This use of mirroring/doubling and distorting an image, as crystallised in the works of Penker, is to Freud a key constituent of an uncanny situation as it emerges through his analysis of the short story “Die Elixire”.</p>
<p>A kind of reflection is also present in the works of Simon MacEwan, thanks to a vertical axis of symmetry that runs through them. His <em>Transit</em> works explore the relations between form and essence, and the properties with which they invest the elements that carry them. The geometrical language of MacEwan hints at the spiritual and the mysterious in a world where the invisible forces of authority and the economy can throw contemporary man’s life out of control. The images of constantly changing clouds and waves are combined with lines and map elements to allude to the chaos of the world and man’s attempt to systematise it.</p>
<p>In the paintings of Avgoustos Veinoglou, familiar architectural structures are turned into uncanny sculptural labyrinths. The rock-carved dwellings of central Anatolia are presented as floating, dreamy worlds which incorporate elements of modern ruins and unfinished structures that engage in a dialogue for analysing and determining the concept of space. In his <em>Metaformations</em>, Veinoglou uses his artistic gaze to combine dream, geology and architecture in utopian spaces which are at once strange and alluring — the very sensation that Sigmund Freud describes as uncanny. </p>
<p>Architecture and the concept of space transformed into imaginary, illusionary places are also key elements in the works of Yannis Savvidis. The paintings in the exhibition come from three of his series — Decompositions, Garden and Stilalive. Imaginary adventures from the life of the Prussian neoclassical architect K F Schinkel and his fatal involvement with the modern-Greek reality, Flemish still-lifes and semantic elements from photographic montages come under the artist’s microscope to provide him with research material. Savvidis reproduces and distorts all these to create new narratives and interpretations which end up turning the initial material from familiar to new and uncanny.</p>
<p>In his work <em>Meteoro</em>, Angelos Antonopoulos abolishes the conventional laws of gravity. His work is a lyrical installation in the manner of the Cabinet of Curiosities — a microcosm, a kind of private micro-museum full of curious objects, or a “memory theatre”. [2] The construction of this surrealist edifice, an air-floating house surrounded by faded graphite portraits, generates a sense of mystery which is magnified by a colour palette limited to neutral colours. This structure, at once credible and implausible, leads visitors to focus mainly on the experience as if they were the audience of a weird theatrical play.</p>
<p>With their works from the <em>Artificialia</em> series, a term that points directly to human artefacts, Kalos &#038; Klio take us into the logic of Curiositiy Cabinets, just like Antonopoulos. Here the strange portraits seem to have been subjected to an almost violent process of dismantling and rearranging human parts, arriving at an uncanny outcome. In this series the use of digital media is harmoniously combined with traditional engraving to complete the metaphysical nature of these disparate images. At the same time it raises questions around the concepts of natural and artificial, familiar and alien, experience and memory.</p>
[1] Freud, <em>The Uncanny</em>, 245.[2] Francesca Fiorani, review of <em>The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine. The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology</em>, Horst Bredekamp. <em>Renaissance Quarterly</em> 51, no. 1 (1998), pp. 268-270..<div class="fusion-clearfix"></div>
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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/KtOXDFJ4vYw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2016/12/back-to-basics-uncanny/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=56802018-02-06T18:37:08Z2016-11-21T17:18:50Z<p>nEUROsis is the new group show that I am participating in and takes place in Limassol, Cyprus. The exhibition deals with issues related to the contemporary socio-economic upheavals.</p>
<p>&#8220;The global financial crisis of the past eight years is heavily impacting most European Mediterranean countries, destabilising not only the symbolic structures of Europe expressed in its initial agreements as unity, stability and equality but also the idea of what the EU is and what it could or should be. There is an observable division within Europe, not only between the Balkan countries and the west but also between north and south, where so called equality amongst nations is resulting in policy decisions which could be argued, favour industrialised members and do not take into account the administrative, financial and specific cultural features of individual European member states. These divides and the contemporary political and theoretical debates around them, form the context for this project, nEUROsis takes a critical look, through art that reflects politically on its own social relevance and engagement at the contradicting values of the EU.&#8221;</p>
<p>nEUROsis consists of 3 events in Limassol, Cyprus:</p>
<ul>
<li>A series of workshops at the Cyprus University of Technology; 16-18 November 2016 at 2:30pm-6:30pm</li>
<li>A seminar at the Cyprus University of Technology; Saturday, 19 November 2016, 5:00pm-8:00pm</li>
<li>An exhibition at NeMe Arts Centre, opening on Saturday, 19 November 2016, at 8:30pm</li>
</ul>
<p>Participating artists: Lanfranco Aceti, Bill Balaskas, Paolo Cirio, Salvatore Iaconesi, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Tony Maslić, Jonathan Munro, Ioakim Mylonas, Oriana Persico, Evi Tselika, and Stelios Tzivas.<br />
Exhibition curator: Yiannis Colakides</p>
<p>Seminar speakers: Lanfranco Aceti, Salvatore Iaconesi, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Chrystalleni Loizidou, Jonathan Munro, Oriana Persico and Evi Tselika.</p>
<p>Exhibition duration:<br />
19 November 2016 – 18 December 2016<br />
Opening Days/Times:<br />
Tuesday-Friday: 5:30pm-8:30pm, Saturday: 10:00am-1:00pm</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/78z-ilbAiWI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2016/11/neurosis/Lanfranco Acetihttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.comhttp://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/?p=54042018-02-06T18:37:09Z2016-10-07T02:26:34Z<p>How does one inhabit emptiness? There is a tension and struggle between the will of the space in preserving its void and the will of the forces that wish to occupy it. This conflict became the subject matter of conversation between the Director of <a href="http://www.emst.gr" target="_blank">EMST (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens)</a>, Katerina Koskina, and curator Lanfranco Aceti after they shared their concerns for the realization of any exhibition starting from zero. These concerns are only magnified in the case of the opening of a new museum, as is the current situation of the EMST.</p>
<p><i>empty </i><i>pr</i><i>(œ)</i><i>mises</i> is a project conceived and curated by Katerina Koskina and Lanfranco Aceti for which artists are invited to visualize and localize the struggle between the promise of a future idea and the process of realization in the empty premise &#8211; the temporary exhibition space of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST).</p>
<p>Artworks <i>in </i><i>fieri</i> will be selected for an online exhibition with the <a href="http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org" target="_blank">Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC)</a> by a committee consisting of Lanfranco Aceti, Bart De Baere, Katerina Koskina, Barbara London and Monika Szewczyk. The art projects will also be considered for future physical exhibitions at EMST. The most exceptional project proposals will be included in a highly illustrated catalogue published by the <a href="http://www.leoalmanac.org" target="_blank">Leonardo Electronic Almanac – MIT Press</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2016/10/empty-proemises-curatorial-statement/" target="_blank">Curatorial Statement, Weblink</a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/2016/10/empty-proemises-call-for-submissions/" target="_blank">Call for Submissions, Weblink</a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Empty-Proemises-Submission-Package.pdf" target="_blank">Application Package, PDF</a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Empty-Proemises-Ground-Plan.pdf" target="_blank">Ground Plan, PDF</a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Empty-Proemises-PUBAGREE_LEA.pdf" target="_blank">Publication Agreement Form, PDF</a></p>
<p><a href="http://lanfrancoaceti.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Empty-Proemises-Image_Video_Work_Release.pdf" target="_blank">Image Release Form, PDF</a></p>
<p>Photo by <a href="http://www.panos-kokkinias.com/images/leave-your-myth-in-greece/yiorgis.html" target="_blank">Panos Kokkinias</a>.</p>
<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/lanfrancoaceti/FEED/~4/JUY3OqHnwCU" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>0http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2016/10/empty-proemises-announcement/